William Lisle Bowles was, with Thomas Warton and Charlotte Smith, among those who in the late eighteenth century sought to revive the sonnet form. His own sonnets are particularly noteworthy for their responsiveness to landscape. Their diction was influential, though less original than one might think, as some investigation of late eighteenth century descriptive poetry and the picturesque travel effusions of William Gilpin (1724-1804) confirm. If Bowles borrowed from other writers, however, greater writers borrowed from him. Thus, “To the River Wensbeck” is echoed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “Kubla Khan” and “Dejection: An Ode” (line 96). Similarly, Bowles’s sonnet “To the River Itchin” influenced Coleridge’s “To the River Otter,” and his poem “On Leaving Winchester School” probably inspired two similar poems, “Sonnet: On Quitting School for College” and “Absence. Farewell Ode on Quitting School for Jesus College, Cambridge,” by the better poet. Though ostensibly dated 1788, Coleridge’s “Sonnet: To the Autumnal Moon” is almost surely an imitation of Bowles, just as Coleridge’s “Anthem for the Children of Christ’s Hospital” is an adaptation of Bowles’s “Verses on the Philanthropic Society.” Coleridge’s sonnet “Pain” should also be compared with Bowles’s sonnet XI, “At Ostend,” to which it is indebted. Coleridge was indebted to Bowles not only for imagery, phrases, and subjects, but for attitudes as well. Thus, Bowles’s early poems are topographical and melancholic, with time his major theme. He then moved toward more outgoing, humanitarian utterances and eventually to public manifestos full of noble sentiments but of no other lasting interest.

In Bowles’s later sonnets, written after 1789 (when John Milton’s influence on him became more evident), the diction is less stilted and of some historical importance. Sonnets XXIII to XXVII, for example, probably influenced William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” which specifically echoes XXVII (“On Revisiting Oxford”). Sonnets XX and XXII anticipate the imagery of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Bowles was among the first of the minor descriptive poets to abandon much of eighteenth century diction in favor of a fresher, more experiential imagery, even if his own was weak, occasionally trite, moralistic, and too often encumbered by personification. Granting that Bowles failed to achieve poetry of lasting distinction himself, his own work still pointed toward the heights that Wordsworth and Coleridge achieved. Although Wordsworth’s pronouncements in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (2d ed., 1800) do not always reflect his own poetic practices, they are surprisingly like a pro-and-con discussion of Bowles.

Monody, Written at Matlock

Unfortunately, Bowles failed to develop as a poet beyond the promise of his later sonnets. His longer and more pretentious poems attracted readers in their day but now seem disappointingly flat. Among the best of them is Monody, Written at Matlock, which was a favorite with Coleridge. In it, an eighteenth century mind saturated with the melancholy of Thomas Gray confronts the Romantic landscape of the peak. Though a monody is normally a lament or dirge, often about another poet’s death, it is hard to see what Bowles had to be so gloomy about, as there seems to be little connection between the landscape and his reflections, which are the expected ones of a poet revisiting a scene of his youth. There is, however, no better poem to compare with Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” to help one see both the conventionality and the originality of Wordsworth’s masterpiece.

The Picture

A second longer poem of interest is The Picture , which (like Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas”) is based on a painting owned by Sir George Beaumont—in this case, a landscape by Peter Paul Rubens. Compared with...