BOWLES, WILLIAM LISLE

born , Sept. 24, 1762, Kings Sutton, Northamptonshire, Eng. died April 7, 1850, Salisbury, Wiltshire English poet, critic, and clergyman, noted for his Fourteen Sonnets (1789), which expresses with simple sincerity the thoughts and feelings inspired in a mind of delicate sensibility by the contemplation of natural scenes. Bowles was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and became an Anglican priest in 1792. His Fourteen Sonnets was enthusiastically received by the early Romantic poets, whose theory and practice it foreshadowed, and the work particularly influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Once its impact had been made, however, it took its place as a minor work of some talent but lacking the sustained inspiration and strength of great poetry. As a critic, Bowles is remembered for his assertion that natural objects and basic passions are intrinsically more poetic than are artificial products or mannered feelings. This attitude may have influenced Bowles's annotated 1806 edition of the works of Alexander Pope, in which, under a mask of judicial impartiality, Bowles attacked the great poet's moral character and poetic principles. So began the pamphlet war known as the PopeBowles controversy, in which Pope's chief defenders were Thomas Campbell and Lord Byron; Byron's characterization of Bowles as the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers is perhaps the only memorable remnant of this seven-year-long (181926) public argument.