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Percy Bysshe ShelleyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Shelley’s identification with Romanticism, an artistic and literary movement, is observable both in his literary contributions (including “Ozymandias”) and the biographical details of his life. Romanticism originated in France and Britain in the early 1800s, and its adherents emphasized ideals such as the power of the imagination, the importance of emotion, and the power of nature.
“Ozymandias” reflects all of these ideals. The poem’s imagery contrasts descriptions of the desert, where the statue exists, with the concrete example of the manmade statue; the placement of the statue against this landscape highlights the superiority of nature, which, slowly but surely, is overpowering the monumental efforts of one man to be immortalized and defy the passage of time.
The sheer size of the statue hints at another Romantic notion, that of the sublime; the word “sublime” describes a moment in which an individual experiences emotional overwhelm as a result of confronting the majesty of nature, and the image of the ruined statue in the desert invites such a response. More impressive than the statue, according to the Romantic notion of the sublime, is the seemingly endless expanse of desert that appears to consume the statue’s ruins as the natural stone wears down into grains of sand, returning the monument, a testimony to human power, to its earthbound origins.
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mutability
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prometheus Unbound
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Masque of Anarchy
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Triumph of Life
Percy Bysshe Shelley
To a Skylark
Percy Bysshe Shelley