This book considers the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who foreshadowed the imaginative development of the novel - its growth in introspectiveness, interest in the individual and psychological insight, in fulness, and in an exploratory-creative use of language. These are found principally in the work of Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence. Blake, Coleridge and Keats are considered particularly in the aspect of their recreative response to Shakespeare. Attention is concentrated chiefly on Wordsworth, Crabbe, and Byron as forerunners of the novelists. The following works are discussed: Wordsworth's tales of "Margaret" and "Michael,""The Prelude," and poems contemporary with "The Prelude" and later; Crabbe's "Tales in Verse"; and Byron's"Beppo,""The Vision of Judgment," and "Don Juan." The discussion is concerned not only with general relationships, but also with what the poem or story is about, what it says, and how it is said. (CL)