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"Ozymandias" is the title of 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 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.

Background
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Writing
Shelley wrote the poem quickly around Christmas in 1817 —either in December that year or early January 1818. He initially wrote it in competition with his friend Horace Smith. John Rodenbeck dates the competition's beginning to 27 December. The two decided to write a sonnet based on the phrase "Ozymandias, King of Kings". Shelley revised his sonnet several times—only the first line remained unchanged from his first draft.

Publication history
"Ozymandias" was published under the pen name Glirastes on the 24th page of number 524 of The Examiner—which was run by Hunt—on Sunday, 11 January 1818. "Ozymandias" was republished in the paper the following day. Smith's sonnet of the same name was published several weeks later. Shelley's work was first published in a book in the 1819 Rosalind and Helen. In 1861 Palgrave's Golden Treasury included the poem.

Analysis and interpretation
"Ozymandias" has not been analyzed as much as would be expected for a poem of its popularity; William Freedman wrote in Studies in Romanticism that "probably few poems are at once as widely known and little discussed as Shelley's "Ozymandias." He considered Graham Hough's opinion that "Ozymandiasis an extremely clear and direct poem, advancing to a predetermined end by means of one firmly held image," to sum up the opinion of many critics. Most analysis of the poem has revolved around debating its inspirations. Desmond King-Hele noted that "No one who was asked to select a typical poem of Shelley's would choose Ozymandias: intuitively one feels the poem is completely untypical".

Because the poem includes many characters who play a role in its narration, it can be and has been interpreted in many different ways.

Influences
There is no clear single influence for the poem, but Shelley is thought to have drawn on a variety of experiences in writing it, and his description matches no existing statue.

He had recently read Library of History by Diodorus Siculus, a first century BC historian. Diodorus described a statue that was supposedly the largest in Egypt, which he deemed "Ozymandias" (an alternate name of Ramesses II, who at the time was little known). Shelley also likely had interacted with "Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts", which had been written by Thomas Legh and published in the Quarterly Review of October 1816. The article described the destruction of the statue. A statue of Ramesses II, the Younger Memnon, was likely the influence for Diodorus's account. It was being taken from Egypt to Britain around the time Shelley wrote his poem.

Shelley himself never saw the statue, which reached England in March 1818 and was displayed later that year, at which point the poet had both left the country and published the poem. His description in the poem does not match what the statue looks like. Shelley also never visited Egypt. Several scholars have noted that Egyptian sculptures generally did not have the features that Shelley described. Some, including D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, argue that Shelley is describing a 'stock' tyrant rather than a specific person.

Hadley J. Mozer argues in the European Romantic Review that Shelley based his description of Ozymandias on Lord Byron, who Shelley was a noted rival of. Mozer compares Shelley's lines “frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” to the "Byronic hero" and a painting of Byron by George Henry Harlow. They note that "no compelling candidate for the face itself has surfaced" from Egyptian ruins, and consider the poem to depict Shelley warning Byron of "the vanity of his literary celebrity." Mozer argues that the poem is in the tradition of De casibus virorum illustrium that predicts the fall of Byron and Shelley's rise.

Shelley was likely influenced by the works of Comte de Volney, notably his 1791 The Ruins: or, a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, written about how civilizations failed. He may also have drawn on Vivant Denon's 1802 Vogage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, Description de l'Égypte, and Richard Pococke's Description of the East. H. M. Richmond considers Pococke an "ideal candidate for the role of the 'traveller'" that Shelley drew his description from.

Shelley was also probably influenced by the recent fall of Napoleon. Other possible works include Walter Raleigh's History of the World. In 1957 Johnstone Parr examined most of the proposed inspirations to that date and emerged with "very little conviction that Shelley's account came from any of them". He proposed that Shelley's description might have come from a lost issue of the The Traveller that was published from October-December 1818. 

Themes
Mozer sums up the meaning of the poem as "a warning to kings and tyrants – past, present, and future; both domestic and foreign – that their power will eventually fade, their lives come to an end, their legacies be forgotten." Mozer739-745

The poem paraphrases the inscription which was recorded on the base of the statue, although there was not a readable inscription during Shelley's life. It was given by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca historica as:

"King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works."

Shelley paraphrased that line into "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair." He may not have taken it directly from Diodorus, as by the time Shelley wrote the poem the epitaph as "virtually a commonplace". The line is ironic because the tyrant's works have clearly faded, although the "artist's creation has partially withstood the ravages of time." The poem emphasizes that "no tyrannical power lasts forever". Jager argues that Yahweh is responsible for the destruction.

The decline has also been interpreted as "a cutting commentary on the future of his [Shelley's] own Britain and its empire, doomed by its arrogance and inequity to a similar fate."

Freedman considers the poem's commentary on "the transience of human power and accomplishment" to state that "the truth is not [. . .] the product of first perception; one must wait for reliable or final answers." He believes that the whole poem "postpones" its message to the end by including a traveler and decribing the statue in "fragmented construction". Lines three ("Near them, on the sand") to nine ("These words appear") express one thought, but it does not become understandable until still later in the poem. He notes that the art's survival implies that "life, in so far as it survives at all, survives only in the lifeless images of art." By delaying the poem's message throughout, Shelley implies that understanding deepens over time.

Narrative and scene
The poem includes four characters, centering around the unknown traveler "from an antique land" and his meeting with an unknown speaker. The other two are the sculptor—possibly Memnon of Sienitas—and the tyrant, Ozymandias.

"Ozymandias" goes through several narrative frames starting from an "I" point of view. Brown considers the first lines "off-handedly downbeat" and having little to distinguish them from prose". The point of view soon switches to that of "a traveler" who speaks in third-person. This traveler similarly begins by speaking in an "almost deliberately unpoetic manner" but soon his lines become more broken. The traveler has been cited as "a reliable fellow" by Desmond King-Hele, one who can either make the poem more believable or cast doubts on its authenticity. The traveler also functions in the role of a "judge", watching the events that unfold but he is not involved in them. Brown considered the traveler to have a "dryly indicative" tone.

As Ozymandias begins to be described, the poem's mood shifts to become more intensely emotional. Shelley makes use of ascending tricolon and polysyndeton as well as more "emotive and interpretive" language. Other literary devices such as alliteration and trochaic substitution are used. Finally, the sonnet ends with Ozymandias himself speaking. By having an anonymous figure narrate the poem and an anonymous traveler provide the information that it is based on, Shelley "distances" himself from the sonnet in a manner that is uncharacteristic of his poetry.

The statue was sculpted by an unknown sculptor, who Mozer considers Shelley's "primary alter ego". Brown argues that the sculptor is "in some ways the most intriguing" character, in large part because they are the medium through which information about Ozymandias is conveyed.

Freedman notes that the characters all complement and affect each other; he uses the metaphor of a Chinese box with Ozymandias as the center or "source" of the poem, surrounded by the sculptor who passes on an image of and information about Ozymandias, followed by the traveler who passes information about the sculptor, and finally information passes through the narrator. BROWN 66 Walter Stephens argues in MLN that the poem "emphasizes the oral over the written" because it is "spoken by a narrator who repeats the words spoken by a traveler." He feels that the pedestal's inscription feels as though it is spoken as well.

The poem is set on a "bleak featureless desert landscape", which emphasizes how completely the king's empire has fallen. The desert scene has no specified time or place; the scholar M. K. Bequette considered this lack of specificity to allow the scene to have "a solid physical reality" rather than being "merely a vehicle for some moral lesson." The scene has been compared to the paintings of Salvador Dalí, a surrealist artist.

Form
Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a heterodox sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, but with a rhyme scheme of (ABAB ACDCED EFEF). By "interlocking" rhyming lines of ABAB and EFEF in the first and last four lines, Shelley begins in present day, brings the reader to the past, and returns to the present, according to James Brown. The irregularity in the middle is reflective of the "disruptive presence of at least the surviving traces of Ozymandias". Brown considered it to be structurally similar to Shelley's earlier "Ode to the West Wind."

It is fourteen lines long.

Religious imagery
Rodney S. Edgecombe considered it to "almost unconsciously" include elements of "Judeo-Christian iconology", drawing on the stories of David and Goliath and Holofernes and Judith for his "frown/And wrinked lip, and sneer of cold command". Edgecombe notes that Shelley was an atheist, but considers Ozymandias' legs to be representative of "broken pillars", which in turn references columns as "emblematic pillars" that stand for "the eclipse of autocratic government". Edgecombe argues that by placing Ozymandias' head on the ground near the legs Shelly is invoking imagery of the crucifixion of Jesus, many paintings of which include a skull at the foot of the cross. Ozymandias' head therefore serves as a reminder of "the universality of death."

Peter Sorensen argues that the tyrant Ozymandias represents is George III.

Reception and impact
The poem has been cited as Shelley's "best-known poem" and is generally considered one of his best works, though it is sometimes considered uncharacteristic of his poetrry. An article in Alif cited "Ozymandias" as "one of the greatest and most famous poems in the English language". Stephens considered that the Ozymandias Shelley created dramatically altered the opinion of Europeans on the king. Donald P. Ryan wrote that "many poems have been written about ancient Egypt and its ruins. [. . . "Ozymandias"] stands above the rest" and described the sonnet as "a short, insightful commentary on the fall of power".

"Ozymandias" has been included in many poetry anthologies, particularly school textbooks, where it is often included because of its perceived simplicity and the relative ease with which it can be memorized. Several poets, including Richard Watson Gilder and John B. Rosenman, have written poems titled "Ozymandias" in response to Shelley's work.

The poem has impacted numerous other works, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It has been translated into several languages, notably Russian, where Shelley was an influential figure.

In popular culture
In the AMC drama Breaking Bad, the 14th episode of season 5 is titled "Ozymandias." The episode's title alludes to the collapse of protagonist Walter White's drug empire.