SOURCE: “Wordsworth's Reading of Bowles,” in Notes and Queries, Vol. 30, No. 2, June, 1989, pp. 166-67.

In the following essay, Wu discusses Bowles's influence on two early sonnets by William Wordsworth.

At some point after 1828,¹ William Wordsworth told Alexander Dyce that he had read William Lisle Bowles's Fourteen Sonnets on publication; his recollection is quite specific:

When Bowles's Sonnets first appeared,—a thin 4to pamphlet, entitled Fourteen Sonnets,—I bought them in a walk through London with my dear brother, who was afterwards drowned at sea.

(Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. Revd. Alexander Dyce (London, 1856), 261 n.)

Mary Moorman's dating of the walk through London as Christmas 1789,²supported by Mark Reed in his chronology,³is surely correct. It does not, however, accord with Wordsworth's statement, which refers to a purchase on or near the date of publication of Fourteen Sonnets—c. May, not December 1789. In fact, the surviving...