SOURCE: Reiman, Donald H. Introduction to The Poet's Fate, by George Dyer. In Odes and The Poet's Fate, pp. v-xii. New York: Garland, 1979.

In the following introduction, Reiman summarizes Dyer's life and discusses his poetry, concluding that the poet was one of the bright lights of the era, if not its best poet.

George Dyer (1755-1841), friend of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth and beloved by Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, was one of the great “originals” of his age—a man who, had Thomas Love Peacock known him, would certainly have graced one of his novels of talk as a lovable eccentric. Anecdotes about Dyer fill the letters and essays of Lamb, the writings of Hazlitt, the letters of Southey, and the journals of Henry Crabb Robinson. Dyer wrote a memoir of his friend the Reverend Robert Robinson (1796) that Wordsworth regarded as one of the finest biographies in...