Living in the Lincolnshire fens,"Among reeds and mud, begirt with dead brown lakes", as he reported in verses sent to a friend, proved fatal to Dyer's tubercular condition. Some months after the publication of his final poem, he died in December 1757. His major poems were published by Robert Dodsley in 1761, followed later by wider selections that included his earlier poems from Savage's miscellany. The contents of these varied little, until the appearance of "The Poems of Mark Akenside and John Dyer", This included manuscript poems in the possession of a family descendant, William Hilton Longstaffe, who had earlier written a commentary on some of these in "The Patrician". Edward Thomas brought out a shorter selection in 1903 for the Welsh Library and there have been American studies of his poetry since then.