'Grongar Hill'
A New Miscellany: Being a Collection of Pieces of Poetry, from Bath, Tunbridge, Oxford, Epsom, and Other Places, in the Year 1725 … To Which is Added, Grongar Hill, a Poem.
London: T. Warner, [1726].
Price: $1,000.00
About the item
First edition, containing the second edition of Dyer's "Grongar Hill" [vi], 90 pp. 12mo. 'Grongar Hill'. Modern tan buckram. Title and final leaf extended at inner margin, some soiling and toning, a few running page numbers trimmed at top margin. Case 335; ESTC N20426 (10 copies). Provenance: Louis & Anne Marie Davidson (bookplate).
Item #308035
First edition of this poetic miscellany continaing the second printing of John Dyer's topographical poem "Grongar Hill," a description of a climb above his home Aberglasne in Carmarthenshire, Wales. "Publication of Dyer's poems started in 1726 with three versions of ‘Grongar Hill’ in separate miscellanies, as a Pindaric ode and in two versions of octosyllabic couplets" (ODNB). The present example is the first in octosyllabic couplets; a revised version was published in a July 1726 Miscellany by David Lewis.
Dyer's poetry of place and his direct, plain language, anticipates the poetry of Wordsworth, who praised Dyer's works in his sonnet "To the Poet, John Dyer"
