Audiobook The Great Poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley. Idealist, atheist, outcast, political radical and, of course, poet – Percy Bysshe Shelley was, in many ways, the epitome of the Romantic artist. His poetry was an outlet for his passionately-held and highly unpopular beliefs; beliefs which resulted in social exclusion, exile, and possibly even his premature death at the age of twenty-nine.