Historical DocumentsĪ description of the statue of Ramses II from the first century B.C. One of Shelley's manuscript copies of 'Ozymandias,' now located in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.Ī picture of Shelley's gravestone from a great website about the burial places of poets. The British Museum's page for the statue of Ramses II. the guy who played Gandhi in the movie of the same title, showing off his poetry-reading skills by reading 'Ozymandias.' AudiosĪ brief history lesson about Ramses II and a description of the statue from the British Museum's website. While Shelley has a reputation for radical and experimental poetry, 'Ozymandias' is a pretty 'tame' poem compared to many of his other works it is written in a well-known and widely-used form – a fourteen-line sonnet – and doesn't say anything too offensive like 'We should all be atheists' (Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet advocating just this).īen Kingsley, a.k.a. Smith published his poem less than a month later, with a title almost as long as the poem itself: 'On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.' You can take a look at Smith's poem here. Shelley published his poem in January of 1818 in The Examiner, a periodical run by his other friend Leigh Hunt (pronounced 'Lee').

Shelley, like Napoleon, was fascinated by this giant statue. That's partly because it weighs almost 7.5 tons. In the 1790's Napoleon Bonaparte had tried to get his hands on the statue, but was unable to remove it from Egypt. Late in 1817 Percy Shelley and his friend Horace Smith decided to have a sonnet competition – that's right folks: a sonnet competition! For the subject of their sonnets, Shelley and Smith chose a partially-destroyed statue of Ramses II ('Ozymandias') that was making its way to London from Egypt, finally arriving there sometime early in the year 1818.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley