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William Lisle Bowles (September 24, 1762 - April 7, 1850)
was an English poet and critic.
He was born at King's Sutton, Northamptonshire, where his
father was vicar. At the age of fourteen he entered
Winchester College, the headmaster at the time being Dr
Joseph Warton. In 1781, Bowles left as captain of the
school, and went on to Trinity College, Oxford, where he had
won a scholarship. Two years later he won the chancellors
prize for Latin verse. In 1789 he published, in a small
quarto volume, Fourteen Sonnets, which were praised by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle.
The Sonnets even in form were a revival, a return to an
older and purer poetic style, and by their grace of
expression, melodious versification, tender tone of feeling
and vivid appreciation of the life and beauty of nature,
stood out in strong contrast to the elaborated commonplaces
which at that time formed the bulk of English poetry. After
taking his degree at Oxford, Bowles entered the church, and
was appointed in 1792 as vicar of Chicklade in Wiltshire. In
1797 he received the vicarage of Dumbleton in
Gloucestershire, and in 1804 became vicar of Bremhill in
Wiltshire. In the same year he was collated by Bishop
Douglas to a prebendal stall in Salisbury Cathedral. In 1818
he was made chaplain to the Prince Regent, and in 1828 he
was elected residentiary canon of Salisbury.
The longer poems published by Bowles are not of a very high
standard, though all are distinguished by purity of
imagination, cultured and graceful diction, and great
tenderness of feeling. The most extensive were The Spirit of
Discovery (1804), which was mercilessly ridiculed by Byron;
The Missionary of the Andes (1815); The Grave of the Last
Saxon (1822); and St John in Patmos (1833). Bowles is
perhaps more celebrated as a critic than as a poet. In 1806
he published an edition of Alexander Pope's works with notes
and an essay, in which he laid down certain canons as to
poetic imagery which, subject to some modification, were
later accepted, but which were received at the time with
strong opposition by admirers of Pope and his style. The
controversy brought into sharp contrast the opposing views
of poetry, which may be roughly described as the natural and
the artificial.
Bowles maintained that images drawn from nature are
poetically finer than those drawn from art; and that in the
highest kinds of poetry the themes or passions handled
should be of the general or elemental kind, and not the
transient manners of any society. These positions were
attacked by Byron, Thomas Campbell, William Roscoe and
others, while for a time Bowles was almost solitary. William
Hazlitt and the Blackwood critics came to his assistance,
and on the whole Bowles had reason to congratulate himself
on having established certain principles which might serve
as the basis of a true method of poetical criticism, and of
having inaugurated, both by precept and by example, a new
era in English poetry. Among other prose works from his
prolific pen was a Life of Bishop Ken (2 vols., 1830-1831).
His Poetical Works were collected in 1855, with a memoir by
George Gilfillan.
