Geoffrey Chaucer

Here is a man who transformed English from a language of merchants and servants into the vehicle of great literature. Geoffrey Chaucer, born in the early 1340s to a wine merchant family, lived a double life that few could imagine: customs officer by day, literary revolutionary by night. Within the south transept of Westminster Abbey, where the medieval stone walls meet centuries of history, Chaucer became the first writer laid to rest in what would become Poets Corner. He died in October 1400, not celebrated as a poet but buried for his practical work as Clerk of the King's Works, the man who maintained royal buildings including the Abbey itself.

For twelve years he worked as comptroller of customs at the port, tracking wool shipments and collecting taxes. Yet during diplomatic missions to France, Spain, and Italy, he absorbed the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. This inspired his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English rather than the fashionable French, making literature accessible to ordinary people for the first time. In 1556, his grave was enhanced with a monument recognizing his true legacy. Nearly 200 years after his burial, Edmund Spenser asked to be interred nearby, and the tradition of Poets Corner was born.