SOURCE: “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 527-57.

In the following excerpt, Abrams examines a mystery that has puzzled many literary scholars; that is, why such a minor poet as Bowles would inspire such enthusiastic praise from major Romantic poets, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge and Bowles

I have quoted Coleridge's derogation of Gray from the first chapter of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge reviewed his own early development as a poet. To Gray's style he opposed that of three poems, the only contemporary models he mentioned with approval; and all three, it is important to note, were of a type which combines local description with associated meditation. One was William Crowe's conventional prospect poem, Lewesdon Hill (1788) and another was Cowper's The...