SOURCE: An introduction to Fourteen Sonnets 1789, by William Lisle Bowles, Woodstock Books, 1991.

In the following introduction, Wordsworth briefly discusses earlier poets who influenced Bowles and later poets who Bowles, in turn, inspired.

Bowles was the poet of a single moment and a single mood. He was a sort of John the Baptist to Coleridge—except that Coleridge started by worshipping him. Wordsworth, late in his life, recalled buying Fourteen sonnets (at Christmas 1789), and annoying his brother John by pausing to read it in a niche of London Bridge. The occasion seems to have been remembered more for John, drowned at sea in 1805, than for the poetry. Bowles was one among many who contributed at this time to the building of Wordsworth's style and sensibility. Charlotte Smith's Elegiac sonnets were as important, Helen Maria Williams was scarcely less so. Bowles's influence on Wordsworth would come at a secondary stage...