SOURCE: “William Lisle Bowles,” in Eighteenth Century Literature: An Oxford Miscellany, Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 151-83.

In the following essay, Casson discusses Bowles's role as both poet and critic in the transition from eighteenth century poetry to Romantic poetry.

In the transition from the poetry of the eighteenth century to the poetry of the Romantic Movement, no critic has been able to put down his finger and say, ‘Here the old ended, the new began.’ Indeed, the lover of paradox might plausibly assert that the transition dates from the birth of the older school. But no critic could deny the paramount importance of the Lyrical Ballads, as the unmistakable manifesto of the later poetry. If, then, by his art a poet can be shown to have affected the two authors of that book, he may be reasonably regarded as having borne a share in the creation of the new...