'There is a science of the aspects of things, as well as of their nature' - if this dictum of Ruskin is central to his aims in Modern Painters it points also to the remarkable affinity of creative effort to record and to interpret the natural world that links him with Coleridge at the beginning and with Hopkins in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the three writers stand in no simple relation of mere sequence and in this essay, which continues the exploration of the Romantic and Victorian imagination begun in her previous book, The Central Self, Dr Ball follows the...

Dr Ball offers an analysis and evaluation of a number of Victorian long poems and groups of lyrics which trace the course of close personal relationships. Her argument is that whereas Romantic treatment of such material was limited, the Victorian poets not only made this emotional territory their own but explored it with vigour, variety and enterprise, and great technical resource. This is apparent, as Dr Ball shows, whether the poets concern themselves with crises such as loss through death - In Memoriam, Patmore's odes of bereavement - or breakdown - Modern Love, Maud, James...

In this closely argued book Dr Ball is concerned to analyse the imaginative process of self-understanding which emerged as a characteristic feature of English Romantic poetry and, acquiring fresh creative force in the Victorian period, has been transmitted to our own times as a determining principle of the contemporary imagination. Dr Ball relates her discussion to the distinction between the poet speaking directly in his own voice and the impulse to dramatised utterance - the two modes of poetic expression conveniently summed up in Keats's contrasting terms 'egotistical sublime' and...