SOURCE: Lucas, E. V. “George Dyer.” In The Life of Charles Lamb, Vol. 1, pp. 174-203. London: Methuen, 1920.

In the following excerpt, Lucas discusses the circumstances surrounding Dyer's second volume of poetry, and the reworked preface for it, as well as other observations on Dyer's oeuvre.

Dyer's principal work was scholarly or serious; but he had his lighter moments too, when he wrote verses, some of them quite sprightly, and moved socially from house to house. In the letter to Southey on page 172 we have seen something of George Dyer's attitude to poetry. The subject is continued in a letter to Wordsworth, some years later. “To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as good as anybodie's, and God bless him, anybodie's as good as his own, for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than...