JOHN

See also:

• JOHN DYER (c. 1700-1758)
• DYER, SIR EDWARD (d. 1607)
• DYER, THOMAS HENRY (1804-1888)

DYER (c. 1700-1758)  , British poet, the son of a solicitor, was born in 1699 or 1700 at Aberglasney, in Carmarthenshire . He was sent to Westminster school and was destined for the law, but on his father's death he began to study painting . He wandered about South Wales, sketching and occasionally painting portraits . In 1726 his first poem, Grongar Hill, appeared in a miscellany published by Richard Savage, the poet . It was an irregular ode in the so-called Pindaric style, but Dyer entirely rewrote it into a loose measure of four cadences, and printed it separately in 1727 . It had an immediate and brilliant success . Grongar Hill, as it now stands, is a short poem of only 150 lines, describing in language of much freshness and picturesque charm the view from a hill overlooking the poet's native vale of Towy . A visit to Italy bore fruit in The Ruins of Rome (1740), a descriptive piece in about 600 lines of Miltonic blank verse . He was ordained priest in 1741, and. held successively the livings of Calthorp in Leicestershire, Belchford (1751), Coningsby (1752), and Kirby-on-Bane (1756), the last three being Lincolnshire parishes . He married, in 1741, a Miss Ensor, said to be descended from the brother of Shakespeare . In 1757 he published his longest work, the didactic blank-verse epic of The Fleece, in four books, discoursing'of the tending of sheep, of the shearing and preparation of the wool, of weaving, and of trade in woollen manufactures . The town took no interest in it, and Dodsleyfacetiously prophesied that " Mr Dyer would be buried in woollen." He died at Coningsby of consumption, on the 15th of December 1758 .

His peoms were collected by

Dodsley in 1770, and by Mr Edward Thomas in 1903 for the Welsh Library, vol. iv .