John Dyer (1699 – December 1757) was a painter and Welsh poet turned clergyman of the Church of England who maintained an interest in his Welsh ancestry. He was most recognized for Wordsworth’s sonnet, To The Poet, John Dyer, addressed to him, and for Grongar Hill, one of Dyer’s six early poems featured in Richard Savage’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations by Several Hands (February 1726), a collection of works featuring ‘Hillarian’ circle verse. His unsuccessful works include Ruins of Rome, The Fleece, Country Walk, An Epistle To A Friend In Town, To Aurelia and The Enquiry.
Although Dyer’s popularity was short lived after Grongar Hill, William Wordsworth and John Gray praised John Dyer’s imagination and style as having, “more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.”
Famous quotes containing the words john and/or dyer:
“And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Below me trees unnumbered rise,
Beautiful in various dyes:
The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
The yellow beech, the sable yew,
The slender fir that taper grows,
The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs.”
—John Dyer (1699–1758)