O rare Ben Jonson

1637 Ben Jonson (b. 1572), 65, British comic genius and satirist, died in London. Like some other great poets and writers – including Dryden, Tennyson, Browning, Masefield, Dr Johnson, Dickens, Sheridan, Kipling and Hardy – he was honoured by being buried (standing up) in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, with the epitaph: "O rare Ben Jonson".

Poets’ Corner was not originally designated as the burial place of writers, playwrights and poets; the first poet to be buried here, Geoffrey Chaucer, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey because he had been Clerk of Works to the palace of Westminster, not because he had written The Canterbury Tales ...

Categories: english+literature, poetry, biography, history, uk