Percy Bysshe Shelley is more widely known as one of the great Romantic Poets. Yet in his short life he was active politically but also as an essayist where his thoughts and ideas were fresh and innovative. Included in this collection is In Defence of Poetry which contains the quite wonderful suggestion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". By the age of 29 he was dead but his quite remarkable body of work lives on.