Benjamin West Ball

Benjamin West Ball (1823–1896) was an American poet. Reliable library and reference pages consistently identify him as a poet, and surviving editions of his work show a career that stretched from the mid-1800s into the 1890s.

His known books include Elfin Land and Other Poems (1851) and The Merrimack River, Hellenics, and Other Poems (1892). The titles themselves give a good sense of his range: imaginative and fairy-tale moods in one book, and in the other a blend of regional landscape, classical interests, and meditative poetry.

Ball does not seem to have the large modern profile of some of his contemporaries, but his work has remained accessible through public-domain archives and library catalogs. Readers coming to him today can expect lyrical 19th-century verse with a strong feeling for the natural world and a taste for the mythical and idealized.