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William Lisle Bowles, English poet and critic, first achieved fame in 1789
with Fourteen Sonnets, Written Chiefly on Picturesque
Spots during a Journey (1789). He later published a series of long
poems on historical themes with a cosmopolitan scope, such as The Spirit of Discovery (1804), The
Missionary of the Andes (1815), The Grave of
the Last Saxon (1822). The last of these poems, peopled by
Northmen, Englishmen and Normans around the time of William the Conqueror,
reflected Bowles’s antiquarian interests. This was later
followed by another poem on British history, this time with a local
setting: Days Departed, or Banwell Hill (1828).
Bowles’ principal antiquarian work in prose was Hermes Britannicus (1828), on the Celtic deity Teutates.
Bowles’s poetry on medieval Britain was intended to present a new direction for English verse composition, in the same way that his prose criticism fought the poetic icons of the past. His ten-volume edition of Alexander Pope’s works (1806), with notes and a critical essay, attacked Pope’s morals and poetics. Bowles’s attack on this revered figure of English literature sparked a long pamphlet war.
Hymn to Woden represents a good summary of how pagan
Germanic religion was perceived at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. In the notes originally published with the poem, Bowles quotes
long passages from the Poetic Edda and
“The Death Song of Haco” (from Mallet’s work) to show
his erudition, but he draws mostly on stock images used by English
poets before him.
The fact that the Anglicized name “Woden” is used instead of
the Norse form Odin (Óðinn) points
to an English setting for the poem. The mentioning of “Cumri’s
hills” (l. 23) substantiates this reading.The
Descent of Frea [Insert: Hyperlink to this text in
the anthology] from Poems, Containing Sketches of
Northern Mythology, &c (London: Cadell and Davies,
1803), 110, explained that the old Britons were known by the
name of “Cumri” in classical sources. Bowles read
Sayers’s poem and wrote a letter of enthusiastic praise
to the author; see Frank Edgar Farley, Scandinavian
Influence in the English Romantic Movement, Studies
and Notes in Philology and Literature, Vol. 9 (Boston: Ginn &
Co., 1903), 123.
***
Source: Sonnets, and Other Poems, vol. 2 (London: T.
Cadell, Jr., 1801), 69–72.