William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850)

Abstract William Lisle Bowles was a clergyman whose literary pursuits kept him in the public eye for much of his life. The success of his Fourteen Sonnets (1789) encouraged him to expand this series of topographical sonnets. Reviewers initially compared Bowles’s sonnets with Charlotte Smith’s, sometimes accusing him of imitating her. Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised both Smith and Bowles for reviving the sonnet and, in his Biographia Literaria, remarks upon the enormous influence Bowles’s sensibility and technique had on him as a young man. Censurious remarks in Bowles’s 1806 edition of Alexander Pope’s poetry provoked an angry attack by Lord Byron.