Published to accompany a museum exhibition in the United States in 1987, this work illuminates the achievement of William Wordsworth and relates that legacy to the revolutionary age in which he lived - an extraordinary era, giving rise to aesthetic, political, social, economic, and philosophical movements that transformed the western world and helped to shape our modern concepts of man, nature and society. The book surveys the topics essential to a grasp of the period - the age of revolutions, the spirit of the age, the child as father of the man, the discovery of nature, "unity entire", and memory, imagination and the sublime. It contains illustrations of primary artifacts which have been on display at various venues in the United States. The book includes manuscripts of William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many other major writers and poets.