Ozymandias: Or, Writing, Lost Libraries, and Wonder

Abstract

❦Mention Ozymandias and many English speakers will remember some exposure to Percy Shelley’s sonnet during high school. The poem continues to influence popular culture: a search for “Ozymandias” on the Internet reveals three rock-and-roll songs, an album by a German “electro-medieval” musical ensemble, a pianist’s musical project, three different comic-book characters, and elements of video games and science-fiction. 1 Nor has elite culture forgotten the poem: a recent review of Gunther Grass’s autobiography compared the celebrated German novelist to Ozymandias. By belatedly confessing his service in the Nazi army as a teenager, claims the reviewer, the novelist has ceased being “a moral authority on frank and timely facing up to the Nazi past,” relinquishing his previously unquestioned right to criticize his compatriots’ evasion of responsibility. Grass’s monumental cultural stature is compared to a statue that he has “demolished,” its “ruins lying, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, as a warning beside the roadside” (Garton Ash 23). Shelley’s poem has made Ozymandias an emblem of self-deluding hubris, the ambition to be remembered favorably by posterity, and the refusal to acknowledge time’s destruction of human achievement. Yet This essay celebrates the wonder that John Freccero’s Dante course inspired in a particularly naive Yale undergraduate in 1970. It is part of a chapter included in a monograph I am preparing, Writing and Wonder: Mythical Books and Lost Libraries in the Premodern Imagination. All translations are my own except as noted. 1