William Lisle Bowles Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Paul Bauschatz

Critical Essay by Paul Bauschatz

SOURCE: “Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Bowles,” in Style, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 17-40.

In the following essay, Bauschatz claims that Bowles's influence on Romantic poetry was greater than his reputation suggests.

A. Bowles's Language and Style

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) were both impressed by the poetry of William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850). Wordsworth acquired and read Bowles's Fourteen Sonnets almost as soon as they were published in 1789.¹ Coleridge regarded them very highly. His remarks in chapter 1 of the Biographia Literia as well as those in his letters attest to this regard.² He also wrote one of his “Sonnets on Eminent Characters” to Bowles. To us now, this respect is curious since Bowles seems a somewhat bland poet, a practitioner of conventional late eighteenth-century landscape description with platitudes attached. Our present-day, general sense of Bowles's poetry (and it is uncommon now to have any but a general sense) is...
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