Considers 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 fullness, in an exploratory-creative use of language, which the author finds in the work of Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence. He considers Blake, Coleridge and Keats particularly in the aspect of their recreative response to Shakespeare, a response which he suggests was very fertile in the novelists too. But he concentrates attention chiefly on Wordsworth and on Byron as forerunners of the novelists, some of whom he examines in his final chapter.