SOURCE: “‘Dear Native Brook’: Coleridge, Bowles, and Thomas Warton, the Younger,” in Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 6, 1975, pp. 313-15.

In the following essay, Fairbanks disputes the widely-held belief that Bowles's “To the River Itchin” inspired Coleridge's “To the River Otter,” and cites a sonnet of Thomas Warton's as the source of both.

William Lisle Bowles's sonnet “To the River Itchin” has recently achieved some reknown because, in its similarity to Coleridge's “Sonnet: To the River Otter,” it has proved the most convenient example for illustrating the indebtedness to Bowles that Coleridge professes so fervently in the Biographia Literaria.¹ In the third edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M. H. Abrams reprints both sonnets and asserts in a footnote to Coleridge's that his “model was W. L. Bowles's “To the River Itchin”” (II, 287n.). Likewise, the Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973) says of “The River Itchin,” “This and similar...