BOWLES, William Lisle.

£850 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Spirit of Discovery; or, The Conquest of Ocean. First edition of this "very spirited and pretty dwarf epic" - a sidelong compliment by Byron tucked in a footnote to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) - in which Bowles offers a Miltonic, wide-ranging overview of ocean travel and exploration. Institutionally well represented, it is commercially scarce. This copy is presented in a very pretty period morocco binding.The poetical parson William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850) was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Oxford. "He is remembered chiefly for his Fourteen Sonnets published in 1789. His work was greatly admired by the youthful Coleridge (who in 1796 dedicated his Poems to Bowles), as well as by Lamb, Southey, and many others" (Drabble, p. 125). Byron, rankled by Bowles's strictures on Pope, was less kind.The Spirit of Discovery is in five sections, beginning with "The Vision of the Ark", proceeding to the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, the fall of Babylon to the founding of Alexandria, the "Progress of Discovery, in the Atlantic, Cape of Good-Hope, America, &c.", and a general recapitulation and conclusion. George Gilfillan, Bowles's Victorian editor, describes the poet's epic as containing "some bold fancy". Here is Bowles in the third section, describing a trio of explorers: "Ere yet we burst into the wilder deep with Gama; / or the huge Atlantic waste with bold Columbus stem; / or view the bounds of field-ice, stretching to the Southern pole, / With thee,

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