"Ozymandias" ( ) is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London.
The poem was the result of a friendly competition between Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith, using the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, Ozymandias being the Greek name for the pharaoh. Both Shelley's poem and Smith's "Ozymandias" explore the ravages of time to which the legacies of even the greatest are subject.
Ozymandias was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, the reputation of the statue fragment had preceded its arrival in Western Europe. European attempts to acquire the fragment had been made as early as 1798, when Napoleon's expedition unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve it.
Shelley, who had explored similar themes in his 1813 work Queen Mab, was also influenced by Constantin François de Chassebœuf's book Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires), first published in an English translation in 1792.
Writing and publication
The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy and Mary Shelley. At this time, members of their 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 In Shelley's poem, Diodorus has been replaced by "a traveller from an antique land" whom Shelley metaphorically "met".
Shelley wrote the poem around Christmas 1817either in December that year or early January 1818. The poem was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name "Glirastes" in The Examiner, a weekly paper published by Leigh's brother John Hunt in London. Hunt admired Shelley's poetry, and published many of his other works, such as The Revolt of Islam, in The Examiner. Shelley's pen name meant "lover of dormice", "Dormouse" being his pet name for his spouse, author Mary Shelley.
Smith's sonnet of the same name was published several weeks later. Shelley's poem also 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 Ollier and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London.