Dave said:
Shelly apparently wrote this poem in a kind of competition with poet Horace Smith, whose poem covers the same "colossal wreck" with nothing of Shelly's mystery and mastery.
As an aside, "Ozymandias" is a corruption of "Usermaatre", one of the names of Ramesses II, the Great. The image of the statue and the quote attached to it derive from the description of the statue at Ramesses' mortuary template on the west bank at Thebes by Diodorus Siculus. (Shelly was probably inspired to write the poem by seeing a smaller head of "Memnon" [a name erroneously applied to Ramesses] that had recently arrived in Britain, and by modern descriptions of Ramesses' temple which had started to arrive from travellers to Egypt.)
Ironically, ancient Egypt, despite some periods of political disunity, never suffered from a Diamond-style collapse and endured for over three thousand years. It took a further thousand years of foreign domination by Persians, Greeks and Romans for its culture to be gradually eroded, and then finally finished off by the onslaught of the Christians.
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