William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth wrote at a moment when the Industrial Revolution was closing over late-18th-century Britain, and this film traces how they and the poets who followed turned to nature not for scenery but for what they called sublime experience, a way of asking what it means to be human as factories and commerce spread. Peter Ackroyd narrates, with the poets' own words read by Dudley Sutton, David Threlfall, and Cara Horgan. The film follows the shorter, harder lives of Byron, Keats, and Percy Shelley, whose pamphlet 'The Necessity of Atheism' got him expelled from Oxford, and it reads Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a warning about science corrupting nature that still gets repeated today. Their poetry of radical protest against industrial Britain gets set alongside their private lives, free love and religious defiance included, as the source of ideas about liberty and individuality that outlasted the movement itself.