John Dyer

John Dyer was a Welsh poet and painter, born in Carmarthenshire in 1699. He trained as a painter, travelled in Italy in the 1720s, and brought a painter's eye for hill, valley and ruin into his verse.

Grongar Hill, a poem about the Towy valley near his home, first appeared in 1726 and became one of the most anthologised English poems of the century. The Ruins of Rome (1740) came out of his Italian journey; Dyer later took holy orders and served as a country clergyman in Lincolnshire.

His last and longest work was The Fleece (1757), a blank-verse poem in four books on sheep, wool and the cloth trade, published in the year he died. Wordsworth honoured him in a sonnet addressed to the poet of the Fleece.