page_title: Grongar Hill
section_title: A landscape in words
hierarchical_section_title: Grongar Hill / A landscape in words
caption_attribution_description: English: William Gilpin's watercolour sketch of Dinevawr Castle in Cardiganshire in his book Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770
context_page_description: Grongar Hill is located in the Welsh county of Carmarthenshire and was the subject of a loco-descriptive poem by John Dyer. Published in two versions in 1726, during the Augustan period, its celebration of the individual experience of the landscape makes it a precursor of Romanticism. As a prospect poem, it has been the subject of continuing debate over how far it meets artistic canons.
context_section_description: Among the other poems by Dyer that accompanied the first appearance of “Grongar Hill” in Savage's miscellany was his epistle to his teacher Jonathan Richardson, “To a Famous Painter”, in which he modestly confessed that “As yet I but in verse can paint”. After Dyer's death, it was included among his poems as a continual reminder that he had practised both arts. Richardson had been well known as an art theorist and the poetic practice of his apprentice was soon to be questioned by other theorists. William Gilpin, in his popularisation of the concept of the Picturesque, Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782), found Dyer's poetry deficient in that quality. “His distances, I observed, are all in confusion; and indeed it is not easy to separate them from his foregrounds.” And while the immediate detail of the passage beginning “Below me trees unnumber’d rise” (lines 57ff) was justly observed, it was perceptually wrong to discern in equal detail the ivy on the walls of Dinevawr Castle.
  Not all artists were so outspoken. In his textbook Instructions for Drawing and Colouring Landscapes (London, 1805), Edward Dayes returned to the same description of trees downhill that Gilpin cites as a correct middle ground. Though perhaps “it is too much detailed for any mass in a picture” in itself, he finds it commendable nevertheless as illustrating the principle that diversification of form and colour is needed in painting “to prevent monotony”. 
  Bishop John Jebb appealed to other qualities in the text. The demand that a poet should keep to the single viewpoint of an observer is “no more than the objection of a mere painter. It is not the objection of a man of moral sensibility; for who would sacrifice for a technicism of art those specialities which...prepare us for one of the most touching applications in English poetry; for which, be it observed, had we been kept at a distance, according to the rules of perspective, we should not have been sufficiently interested spectators.” Gilpin's own nephew, William Sawrey Gilpin, sided with the bishop's appeal in a theoretical work of his own. “Can the mind be pleased, nay delighted, without being interested?" he objected. “How different the estimation of an extensive prospect that suggested the beautiful reflections of the poet” in the passage beginning “See on the mountain’s southern side" (lines 114-28).
  For all that, the debate over the pictorial qualities of Dyer's poem continued into the 20th century in much the same terms. Christopher Hussey, in his book The Picturesque: studies in a point of view (1927), finds in it a Claudian landscape “composed into a unity”, a claim dismissed by John Barrell in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972). For Barrell the poetic effects are random and the sense of place is disrupted by the way that “the eighteenth century poet is forever interrupting his scene-painting to find its moral or emotional analogue”. On the other hand, Barrell saw little difference between the approaches adopted by either Dyer or William Gilpin. Where the latter lingered over a landscape “according to whether it fulfilled or not his ‘picturesque rules’, the topographical poet chose his subject by its ability to furnish him with apt images to ‘moralize’.”
  Later still, Rachel Trickett exposed the “innate absurdity” of the supposition “that the technique Dyer acquired as a painter could be reproduced with a kind of transliterated accuracy in language.” Furthermore, it is a legitimate part of the poet's role to comment and “Dyer does in fact make a distinction between the visual and the perceptual by separating his passages of description and of moralizing”.
caption: William Gilpin's sketch of Dinevawr Castle, illustrating his theory of perspective, 1782
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