McSweeney discusses the sensory acuity that informs the finest achievements of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman and Dickinson and which, when blunted by illness or age, contributes to an attenuation of their creative power. He supplies a 'sensory profile' or sensory history for each author and through close readings shows how this profile affected their relationship to the external world and their powers of symbolic perception.