Ozymandias

"Ozymandias" ( ) is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of '' The Examiner'' of London.
The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection '' Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems,'' and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.

Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith (1779–1849), who also wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the same title. The poem explores the worldly fate of history and the ravages of time: even the greatest men and the empires they forge are impermanent, their legacies fated to decay into oblivion.

Origin

In antiquity, ''Ozymandias'' was a Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 BC), derived from a part of his throne name, ''Usermaatre''. In 1817, Shelley began writing the poem "Ozymandias", after the British Museum acquired the Younger Memnon, a head-and-torso fragment of a statue of Ramesses II, which dated from the 13th century BC. Earlier, in 1816, the Italian archeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni had removed the statue fragment from the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II at Thebes, Egypt. The reputation of the statue fragment preceded its arrival to Western Europe; after his Egyptian expedition in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte had failed to acquire the Younger Memnon for France. Although the British Museum expected delivery of the antiquity in 1818, the Younger Memnon did not arrive in London until 1821.
Shelley published his poems before the statue fragment of Ozymandias arrived in Britain, and the view of modern scholarship is that Shelley never saw the statue, although he might have learned about it from news reports, as it was well known even in its previous location near Luxor.

The book ''Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires'' (1791) by Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820), first published in an English translation as ''The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires'' (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792) by James Marshall, was an influence on Shelley. Shelley had explored similar themes in his 1813 work '' Queen Mab''. Typically, Shelley published his literary works either anonymously or pseudonymously, under the name "Glirastes", a Graeco-Latin name created by combining the Latin ''glīs'' ("dormouse") with the Greek suffix ἐραστής (''erastēs'', "lover"); the Glirastes name referred to his wife, Mary Shelley, whom he nicknamed "dormouse".

Writing, publication and text

Publication history

The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. At this time, members of the Shelleys' literary circle would sometimes challenge each other to write competing sonnets on a common subject: Shelley, John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote competing sonnets about the Nile around the same time. Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in '' Bibliotheca historica'', which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." In Shelley's poem, Diodorus becomes "a traveller from an antique land."

Shelley wrote the poem quickly around Christmas in 1817either in December that year or early January 1818. The poem was printed in ''The Examiner'', a weekly paper published by Leigh's brother John Hunt in London. Hunt admired Shelley's poetry and many of his other works, such as ''The Revolt of Islam'', were published in ''The Examiner''.
Shelley's poem was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name "Glirastes". The name meant "lover of dormice", dormouse being his pet name for his spouse. Smith's sonnet of the same name was published several weeks later. Shelley's poem appeared on page 24 in the yearly collection, under Original Poetry. It appeared again in Shelley's 1819 collection '' Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems'', which was republished in 1876 under the title "Sonnet. Ozymandias" by Charles and James OllierReprinted in

and in the 1826 ''Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley'' by William Benbow

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