For all their monuments of human suffering and power, they achieved nothing. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone This is a poem with true universal value. Ozymandias is a simple homage to human power, to human corruption and to human ruling. He saw through the cracks of civilisation and human greed he saw what man has become and will always be unless he changes. Percy Shelley saw the world for what it was, and what it will be. Famous for his association with his contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, he was also married to novelist Mary Shelley. He was also admired by Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and Bertrand Russell. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life.

However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley