Writing, publication and text Publication history 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". Shelley had explored similar themes in his 1813 work Queen Mab. 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 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. Although the British Museum expected delivery of the antiquity in 1818, the Younger Memnon did not arrive in London until 1821. 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. Earlier, in 1816, the Italian archeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni had removed the 7.25-short-ton (6.58 t 6,580 kg) statue fragment from the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II at Thebes, Egypt. 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. 1279–1213 BC), derived from a part of his throne name, Usermaatre. In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II (r. The statue fragment of Ramesses II, the Younger Memnon, in the British Museum. "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!", exemplifies the arrogance and hubris of a leader who believed his dominion would endure indefinitely. 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.
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 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. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. " Ozymandias" ( / ˌ ɒ z i ˈ m æ n d i ə s/ o-zee- MAN-dee-əs) is a sonnet written by the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).
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