Using a series of dramatic monologues and verse letters, Robert Cooperman explores the public and private personae (the truth beyond facts/that merely clutter) of the poet and political thinker Percy Bysshe Shelley. In poems rich with period detail and psychological insight, Cooperman reveals Shelley as a man torn by the desire for greatness, the desire for love, and the desire to be free. He portrays the private Shelley, driven to find a soul-mate and to espouse the idea of free love in a mercantile society, yet an idealist who never quite realised that his actions could have disastrous consequences for those he loved.