William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850): Church of England clergyman and poet, whose Fourteen Sonnets (1789) were a key contribution to the revival of the sonnet form and a major influence on Coleridge and Southey in the mid-1790s. Bowles was descended from a long line of clergymen and was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. He followed in his family’s tradition and was ordained. He became Vicar of Bremhill, Wiltshire in 1804, a chaplain to the Prince Regent in 1818 and a Canon of Salisbury Cathedral in 1828. His later poems did not find the same public favour as his earlier productions and he became better-known as a critic. His condemnation of the work of Alexander Pope attracted much notice and was rebutted by Byron in a Letter to John Murray (1821). Southey reviewed Bowles’s poem The Spirit of Discovery (1804) and later corresponded with him.