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...thus certainly never saw the landscape he describes in his sonnet. Contrary to popular belief, moreover, he likewise never saw the sculptured head allegedly described in the sonnet, which did not arrive in England until day or two after he and his family had moved permanently to Italy and more than six months after he had published the poem. All the sources and influences visible in the poem were entirely literary and all were part of the common currency of the era. Apart from Diodorus Siculus and the political sonnets of Milton and Wordsworth, they include several classics of travel literature in English and French, most notably the work of Volney.
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This article concentrates on one of the greatest and most famous poems in the English language, Shelley's masterly sonnet "Ozymandias," and deals with three areas of inquiry: 1) the sources of the poem in contemporary travel literature, 2) its meaning, and 3) what its sources and meaning tell us about the nature of "poetic inspiration."
Travel literature offers experience to the entirety of a literate public and for that reason alone has historically had far greater cultural impact than the experience of mere travel itself, which can only be individual and private. To take one small and suggestive example: the two most popular manuscript texts of the late Middle Ages were probably Mandeville's Travels and Marco Polo's Description of the World. Like Herodotus' Histories, these two books are literary compilations, rather than simple records or observations, and as such they quite rightly include fictional elements. It was inevitable that they should have been among the earliest European best-sellers in print, anticipating by many decades the great Renaissance collections of Ramusio and Hakluyt. (1)
But what were the needs they obviously fulfilled? The question cannot begin to be answered until we bear in mind that they inspired not only More's Utopia--the fountainhead of an artistic lineage that includes major works of Rabelais, Cervantes, Bacon, Swift, Defoe, Voltaire, Melville, Twain, Shaw, Wells, Huxley, Orwell, Nabokov, and Calvino, not to mention V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux and J. G. Ballard--but also Columbus' voyage in search of the Indies.
In the case of Shelley's "Ozymandias" the fact that the poem has nothing to do with the poet/speaker's personal physical experience is announced by the first line, which tells us explicitly that the person who had the fictive experience that the poem uses as its central metaphor was not the poet-speaker at all, but "a traveler":
Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown 5 And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive--stamp'd on these lifeless things-- The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: 10 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away."
The name Ozymandias is a Greek rendition of "cUser-macat-rec," the first element in the praenomen or throne name of the ancient Egyptian king now usually known instead by his Ra-name as Ramesses II (1279-1212 B.C.). His mortuary temple was definitively identified at long last by Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832) in 1829. it has been known since as the Ramesseum, and of course still stands on the West Bank at Luxor. (2) The career of this great king, however, was utterly unknown in Shelley's day. Even the name Ramesses would have been recognized only by readers of the Bible and then only as the Hebrew name of an Egyptian city mentioned in Genesis 47.11 and Exodus 1.11, not as the name of a king. Like all his contemporaries, Shelley thus possessed nothing that approaches an ordinary twenty-first-century schoolboy's knowledge of the pharaoh who had boasted the throne name "cUser-macat-rec" three millennia before.
At no time before he wrote the sonnet could Shelley possibly have seen any sculptured head comparable to the one his fictional traveler describes unless he had actually gone to Egypt. In common with all the other English Romantic poets, however, either major and minor, Shelley never set foot in the Land of the Pharaohs, though many of his non-literary contemporaries did so. (3) Nor is there any record, indeed, of his ever even contemplating such a visit. It is therefore quite impossible that "Ozymandias" could have been inspired by any first-hand experience of the poet's involving either its Egyptian setting or a fortiori any decayed colossal sculpture within that setting. There is abundant evidence, in fact, that inspirations for his Egyptian or quasi-Egyptian allusions not only in this sonnet, but also in other works were entirely and exclusively literary.
The two most crucial lines of the sonnet and the name Ozymandias were borrowed from a well-known ancient Greek source, Diodorus Siculus. Among Shelley's other literary sources, the most obvious are works that were virtually contemporary: Volney's Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les annees 1783, 1784, et 1785, published first in 1787 and often reprinted; his Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur revolutions des empires, first published in 1791, an enormously influential work that circulated throughout Europe and was one of the building blocks of Shelley's mind: and Vivant Denon's Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, which appeared in 1802, when Shelley was 10 and became, next perhaps to Lane's Manners and Customs, the most popular and successful book of Egyptology ever published, a staple of any well-furnished gentleman's library throughout the Romantic era. (4) A fourth possible source is Richard Pococke's extraordinary Description of the East, an important and justly famous two-volume opus that contained 178 large plates. (5) And a fifth is the celebrated Description de l'Egypte (1809 [1810]-1829), several volumes of which were already circulating among well-heeled enthusiasts in England. (6)
The great sonnet was published on 11 January 1818. It had apparently been written barely two weeks earlier. The occasion of its composition is now well known. (7) At his house near Marlowe on Saturday 27 December 1817, the day after Boxing Day, Shelley entertained Horace Smith (1779-1849), whom he had met at Leigh Hunt's the previous year. Smith was equally talented as a financier, a verse parodist, and an author of historical novels. The talk seems to have drifted around to Egyptian antiquity and to Diodorus Siculus, whose arrogant epitaph ascribed to Ozymandias "had become virtually a commonplace in the romantic period;" (8) and a friendly competition ensued in which each writer was to produce a sonnet on the subject of "Ozymandias, the King of Kings." Smith came up with the following:
On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows. "I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone. "The King of Kings; this mighty city shows The wonders of my hand." The city's gone! Naught but the leg remaining to disclose The sight of that forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some hunter may express Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What wonderful, but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. (9)
Horace Smith may well have seen the depiction of just such a monumental Pharaonic leg in plate 38 of Volume I of Richard Pococke's A Description of the East and some other Countries. Rich and Egyptophile, he almost certainly owned a copy of this work, the most frequently cited in pioneering Egyptology.
He may also have owned copies of some of the earlier volumes of "the great French work," the Description de l'Egypte, which was still in the course of publication, and he may have shown them to Shelley. It is among the plates of the Description, for example---a view of a colossus standing near the entrance to the hypostyle hall at Karnak--that Shelley could have found his own "vast and trunkless legs of stone." (10) Or he could, of course, simply have imagined them. What Shelley produced, in any case, was the first draft of "Ozymandias," which was published with minimal changes two weeks later on page 24 of number 524 of Leigh Hunt's The Examiner, where Hunt also published Horace Smith's sonnet a fortnight afterwards, on 25 January.
During that same month, January of 1818, the Quarterly Review (London) announced that Henry Salt's first shipment of Egyptian antiquities was on its way to the British Museum. The shipment included a colossal head that Giovanni Belzoni had extracted in 1816 from the ruins of a temple on the West Bank at Thebes and that was, the Quarterly Review declared, "without doubt the finest specimen of ancient Egyptian sculpture which has yet been discovered," (11) It is this head that is commonly supposed to have inspired Shelley, who is alleged to have seen it at the British Museum before he wrote his sonnet.
The vulgar error of believing that Shelley was inspired to write "Ozymandias" by the actual vision of an Egyptian monument or work of art--and specifically by the physical sight of this particular colossal Egyptian sculptured head--has lingered in full strength as a critical commonplace to this day. (12) Based upon that defective idea about art and artists that E. H. Gombrich specifically called "a heresy," (13) this superficially plausible folk thesis has seduced many an amateur critic and is totally fallacious. Shelley simply could not possibly...
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More articles from Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics
From past to present and future: the regenerative spirit of the Abiku...., January 01, 2004
Musical recall: postmemory and the Punjabi diaspora., January 01, 2004
History and poetry.(Critical Essay), January 01, 2004
"Nothing But Little Lines"., January 01, 2004
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