Ozymandias (Smith)

"Ozymandias" is the title of a sonnet published in 1818 by Horace Smith (1779–1849). Smith wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote and published "Ozymandias" in 1818. Smith's poem was published in The Examiner three weeks after Shelley's, on February 1, 1818. It explores the 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.

Writing and publication
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, 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."

Smith's poem was published, along with a note signed with the initials H.S., on 1 February 1818. It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes a similar moral point, but one related more directly to modernity, ending by imagining a hunter of the future looking in wonder on the ruins of a forgotten London. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse, but in later collections, Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below".