I came upon Percy Bysshe Shelley and this poem like many have, a teenager with a school poetry anthology on my desk. It is a good teaching poem, what with its readily accessible irony—and so, “Ozymandias”  came to me, nestled with poems by Keats and Byron, within the handy “The Romantics” chapter.

Stepping outside the poetry, even briefly, into biography, I found them a glamourous bunch of young men to my teenaged heart. The original “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” crew. Political and sexual revolutionaries, aesthetes with groupies. Should I study them, or seek to be them? Well the former was on offer, the latter harder to obtain for someone of my looks and stature.

One Romantic depiction of Shelley’s drowned corpse, which looks better than some of us do alive.

In the 1960s Byron, Keats and Shelley were the rock stars in my textbooks. To the generation before the coming of the 20^th Century Modernists, they seemed that too, even if “rock star” wasn’t yet a metaphor in the shops. So, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites wanted to be Byron, Keats and Shelley too. In America, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Paul Laurence Dunbar showed that you didn’t have to be male or white to feel that urge. Even unique figures like Rabindranath Tagore were touched by their model.

Well, despite the notoriety, the tangled amorous relationships, and the requirement of a tragic early death—yes, in spite of this—in the end the romantic, idealist stance doesn’t remove the poet from the mundane tasks of writing poetry any more than drugs and sex remove from a rock star the need to come up with, well, some music once in a while.

Such is the case here of “Ozymandias.”  Did this poem strike Shelley’s poetic soul in a flash of hashish inspiration while adventuring in the Middle East? Well, no. If we were to continue the musical analogies, it instead came from a silent, slow-motion, written-poetry equivalent of a Battle of the Bands, a Rap Battle, or a songwriter’s Song Pull, a friendly contest undertaken with another poet, Shelley’s contemporary Horace Smith. They both were working off the same short passage from 1^st Century BC Greek historian Diodorus, which gives both of them the plot. Here’s Smith’s “Ozymandias:”

Horace Smith’s version of “Ozymandias.” Not found in schoolbooks.

After they finished their competing works, I wonder how Smith felt. If one goes to poetry for meaning, these two poems make near the same point. Imagery-wise, Shelley’s choice and portrayal of the broken statue on a barren desert does have better selection of detail. And Smith, trying to make his rhyme, has one particularly awkward line, the one ending “holding the Wolf in chace” (“chace” is an Old-French word that was once used in English to mean hunt). But where Shelley kills it here, is his word-music. If you look at Shelley’s manuscript of “Ozymandias”  you can see some of how he worked on these things, so they wouldn’t be “lifeless things.”

Art is not a competition. Criteria are slippery things, and what works in one poem, fails in another. Even day to day, within our own singular selves, what we seek from, or need from, art differs—but Smith’s “Ozymandias”  was rightfully eclipsed by Shelley’s.

In my music and performance of “Ozymandias”  I went counter to other presentations I’ve heard. The poem’s lyricism and the later 19^th Century acceptance of Shelley as a portrayer of ideal beauty has masked the Shelley that was a political radical and iconoclast. As a result, many read it lightly, bringing out its sonic beauty or its pathos. I don’t know how Shelley, the radical, would want it read, but I’ve always felt that the traveler who’s telling this tale knows all too well, in non-historic terms, about living under a hand that mocked them with a sneer of cold command.

Therefore, I emulated the spirit of another English iconoclast, Kevin Coyne, for this piece. I love the probably apocryphal story of Coyne being approached about replacing Jim Morrison in The Doors, that rock star/poet hybrid. In Coyne’s telling, he turned them down because he “didn’t like the leather trousers.”  To hear my sans culottes performance of “Ozymandias,”  with more disgust at tyranny and less pathos at time’s ravages, use the player below.