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Ozymandias, or De Casibus LordByron: Literary Celebrity on the RocksHadley J. Mozer aa Department of English, Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL, USA
Available online: 09 Nov 2010
To cite this article: Hadley J. Mozer (2010): Ozymandias, or De Casibus Lord Byron: LiteraryCelebrity on the Rocks, European Romantic Review, 21:6, 727-749
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European Romantic ReviewVol. 21, No. 6, December 2010, 727749
ISSN 1050-9585 print/ISSN 1740-4657 online 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10509585.2010.514494http://www.informaworld.com
Ozymandias, or De Casibus Lord Byron: Literary Celebrity on the Rocks
Hadley J. Mozer*
Department of English, Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL, USATaylor and Francis LtdGERR_A_514494.sgm10.1080/10509585.2010.514494European Romantic Review1050-9585 (print)/1740-4657 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis216000000December [email protected]
Though rarely discussed in such terms, Ozymandias represents a monumentalmoment in the so-called Shelley-Byron debate or conversation. Noting thefailure of source studies to account convincingly for the origins of the facialfeatures of Ozymandias, this paper argues that the pharaohs frown, / Andwrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command are suspiciously Byronic, evoking thephysiognomy of the Byronic hero and of Byron himself as portrayed in the widelycirculated portrait of 181415 by George Henry Harlow. In other words, this paperargues that Ozymandias is a portrait or rather a word-bust of that early-nineteenth-century literary colossus known as Byron. By depicting that colossusdecapitated and in ruins, Shelley, who felt dwarfed by the genius and celebrity ofByron, prophesies the day when the sun would finally set on the literary empireof the poet whom he despaired of rivaling. Long a routine stop on the grand tourof British Romantic literature, Ozymandias now asks to be revisited as a decasibus poem i.e. a poem on the falls of the mighty that does not merelywarn despots about the vanity of their pride and ambition but that also lecturesLord Byron on the vanity of his literary celebrity.
on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions read. (Percy Shelley, Ozymandias, 181718)
Many of them [young readers obsessed with Lord Byron] practised at the glass, in thehope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear insome of his portraits. (Thomas Babington Macaulay, Edinburgh Review, June 1831)
Over the years the complicated relationship that Percy Shelley and Lord Byronstruck up at the base of the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1816 has triggered anavalanche of scholarly interest. Thus far, however, scholarship exploring the friend-ship, rivalry, and mutual poetic influence of the two poets has had little to say aboutShelleys famous sonnet Ozymandias.1 This critical silence is not particularlysurprising given the apparent historical and geographical distance of the poems Egyp-tian subject matter and its lack of any explicit reference to Byron. Nevertheless, it ismy contention that Ozymandias represents a monumental moment in what CharlesE. Robinson and William D. Brewer have styled, respectively, the Shelley-Byrondebate or conversation2; for I believe that Lord Byron cuts a figure,3 as Keatsmight put it, in Ozymandias or better, that Shelley cuts a figure of Lord Byron in
*Email: [email protected]
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this ekphrastic sonnet describing the ruined statuary of a sneering megalomaniac whothought his Works and fame would endure forever. In other words, I will argue herethat Shelleys statue of Ozymandias is something of a veiled portrait or rather, aword-bust of that early-nineteenth-century literary colossus known as Byron, aslippery term that simultaneously gestures toward the poet George Gordon, LordByron; his most famous literary self-representation, the Byronic hero; and the highlycommercialized literary empire known as Byronism, which was so heavily invested iniconographic representations (mostly portraiture, but some sculpture too) of the poet.Consequently, I will also argue that Ozymandias should be revisited by adventurousliterary travelers as a de casibus poem i.e. a poem on the falls of the mighty thatdoes not merely warn despots about the vanity of their pride and ambition but that alsolectures Lord Byron on the vanity of his literary celebrity by prophesying the daywhen his literary empire, Byronism, will finally lie in ruins a prospect that no doubtcompensated Shelley for his own lack of success compared to the extraordinary clatof his friend and rival.
Dwarfed by Byron
Written in genial competition with fellow poet Horace Smith, who produced a sonnetin the same vein,4 Ozymandias was composed sometime in December 1817 or earlyJanuary 1818 and published in Leigh Hunts Examiner under the pseudonymGlirastes on 11 January 1818, approximately a year and a half after Shelley had metthe (in)famous Lord Byron in Switzerland in the summer of 1816. Given the apparentparameters of the sonnet competition (i.e. the Egyptian theme), Shelley probably didnot set out with the intention of grappling with Byron in Ozymandias. Nevertheless,at some point in the process of putting a face on the megalomaniacal pharaoh,Shelleys thoughts seem to have gravitated toward Byron, whose ghost continued tohaunt Shelley throughout 181617, as Robinson has demonstrated in his discussion ofShelleys correspondence and The Revolt of Islam and Julian and Maddalo, poemscomposed, respectively, before and after Ozymandias, and which clearly engagewith Byron (Robinson 6162, 67, and Chapters 4 and 5). Though the early phase oftheir relationship was amicable, Shelley was savagely critical of Byron at leastprivately almost from his first acquaintance with the aristocratic poet, as is clearfrom Shelleys letter of 17 July 1816 to Thomas Love Peacock:
Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, & as such, is it not to be regretted thathe is a slave to the vilest & most vulgar prejudices, & as mad as the winds? I seereason to regret the union of great genius, & things which make geniuses useless. For ashort time I shall see no more of Lord Byron, a circumstance I cannot avoid regrettingas he has shewn me great kindness, & as I had some hope that an intercourse with mewould operate to weaken those superstitions of rank & wealth & revenge & servility toopinion with which he, in common with other men, is so poisonously imbued. (Reiman,Shelley and His Circle 7: 28)
Nevertheless, despite these reservations Shelley recognized that Byron was destinedfor greatness, telling him in a letter of 29 September 1816 that he was chosen outfrom all other men to some greater enterprise of thought and admonishing him abouthis proper relationship to fame:
It is not that I should counsel you to aspire to fame. The motive to your labours ought tobe more pure, and simple. You ought to desire no more than to express your own
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thoughts; to address yourself to the sympathy of those who might think with you. Famewill follow those whom it is unworthy to lead. (Shelley, Letters 507)
Ultimately, Shelleys acute awareness of Byrons genius occasioned considerableself-doubt, and Shelley could not help but feel small after placing Byron atop such ahigh pedestal. Shelley actually confessed this sense of inadequacy to Byron himselfin a letter of 17 January 1817: though I have not seen you for six months,writes Shelley, I still feel the burden of my own insignificance and impotence(Shelley, Letters 530). Exacerbating Shelleys inferiority complex, as Reiman pointsout, was the continuing gap between [Shelleys] and Byrons contemporary reputa-tions as poets, a fact that undoubtedly galled [Shelley] greatly, in spite of his owngenerous praise of Byrons genius (Shelley and His Circle 7: 47). As that gapincreased, so too did Shelleys ambivalence about, and sense of inferiority to,Byron. In the Preface to Julian and Maddalo (1819) Shelley would offer sincerepraise and harsh criticism of Byron (Count Maddalo), singling out pride as the mostsalient of his flaws:
He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his ener-gies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is hisweakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind withthe dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingnessof human life His ambition preys upon itself I say that Maddalo is proud, becauseI can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings whichconsume him (120)5
A few years later Shelleys sense of inferiority to Byron would erupt in Adonais(1821), where Byron, who had slain the Scotch reviewers earlier in his career whilefighting his way to the top, takes center stage in the procession of mourners at Keatssfuneral as The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame / Over his living head like Heaven isbent, / An early but enduring monument (26466), while Shelley remains on theperiphery as a nobody and the victim of reviewers: Midst others of less note, cameone frail Form, / / He came the last, neglected and apart; / A herd-abandoned deerstruck by the hunters dart (27197). By January of 1822 Shelley felt so abject writ-ing in Byrons shadow that he spoke of himself as a worm and Byron as God ina despairing fragment titled Lines to _____ (Sonnet to Byron in some editions),which, according to Reiman and ONeill, marks [Shelleys] complete capitulation inthe face of Byrons success (247):
If I esteemed you less, Envy would killPleasure, & leave to Wonder & Despair
The ministration of the thoughts that fillMy mind, which, like a worm whose life may share
A portion of the Unapproachable,Marks your creations rise as fast & fair
As perfect worlds at the creators will,And bows itself before the godhead there.
But such is my regard, that, nor your fameCast on the present by the coming hour,
Nor your well-won prosperity & powerMove one regret for his unhonoured name
Who dares these words. The worm beneath the sodMay lift itself in worship to the God. (Reiman and ONeill 251)
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Composed several years before the more explicit engagements with Byron in Julianand Maddalo, Adonais, and Lines to _____, in the same year that Shelley divulgedhis feelings of insignificance and impotence to Byron, Ozymandias registersShelleys emerging ambivalence about, and sense of inferiority to, his friend and rival,whose face, I will argue, is hidden in the rocks right before our very eyes.
The Face that Launched a Thousand Source Studies
Like the smile on the Mona Lisa, the shattered visage of Ozymandias with itsfrown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command has long intrigued specta-tors. More to the point, the face has proven to be particularly elusive in the dizzyinghunt for Shelleys source(s) for the poem. Clearly, the face of Shelleys Ozymandiasis not that of the massive bust of Ramses II that Richard Holmes, in his otherwiseexcellent biography of Shelley, mistakenly claimed had arrived in England in theautumn of 1817 and served as the inspiration for Shelley and Horace Smith, whosupposedly saw the bust on their trips to the British Museum (410). As Toby Venableshas revealed, Shelley never actually saw the bust: its arrival was delayed until thespring of 1818, after the publication of the poem and after Shelley had permanentlyleft England (18).6 But even if Shelley had seen the bust, it could not have providedhim with the facial details in question: still part of the collection of Egyptian antiqui-ties at the British Museum, the colossal bust of Ramesses II (a.k.a. The YoungerMemnon) sports what Venables describes as the most serene and Buddha-like ofsmiles (18) and what the British Museum describes on its Website as a serenesmile (Colossal Bust of Ramesses II), not a sneer. Nor is the face in question to befound on the broken-off bust of the other shattered colossus of Ramses II that couldhave been found at the Ramesseum in Shelleys day (and that still lies there today).Never having traveled to Egypt, Shelley could not have seen the colossus firsthand;moreover, as Johnstone Parr points out, even secondhand contemporary accounts ofthe colossus could not have provided Shelley with the facial details for Ozymandiasbecause erosion had rendered the face of the bust nondescript by 1817: In Shelleysday the face of the head was so obliterated that no one could have discerned a frown,a wrinkled lip, or a sneer of cold command (3233). Neither, then, of these twofamous shattered colossi presumably the most likely candidates for ekphrasticdescription supplied the physiognomy for Shelleys pharaoh.
Nor does Shelley seem to have lifted the face of Ozymandias from some otherEgyptian statuary described or sketched in one of the histories, travel accounts, or othersources that might have been available to him. Though scholars have unearthed provoc-ative accounts of Egyptian ruins featuring broken-off busts and scattered limbs remi-niscent of some of the details in Shelleys sonnet, no compelling candidate for the faceitself has surfaced.7 True, in 1962 H.M. Richmond revealed he had found an illustrationin the first edition of Richard Pocockes A Description of the East, and Some OtherCountries (London, 1743) that purported to represent the upper part of a statue ofOzymandias at Thebes and that depicted a severed bust full face and lying deeplysunk in the sand with an expression that Richmond described as indeed cold andbrutal (69). However, several scholars have taken exception to Richmonds charac-terization of the face. And the cold and brutal face? writes Venables, Well, perhapswe could settle for noncommittal. The drawing hardly fits Shelleys description atall (21). Rodney Stenning Edgecombe also dismisses Pococke as a source for the face,describing the expressions on the images of Memnon and Ozymandias contained in a
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Dutch translation of Pococke as benign and equally bland, respectively (95).Having examined the plates in Pocockes first edition myself (vol. 1, plate accompa-nying p.107), I concur with Venables and Edgecombe: Pocockes Ozymandias bearslittle resemblance to Shelleys sneering pharaoh, the formers countenance striking meas flat, detached, and morally neutral.
Of course, according to some scholars all such efforts to excavate the face ofShelleys pharaoh from the ruins of Egypt are categorically futile because ancientEgyptian statuary did not depict the pharaohs with features like frown[s], wrinkledlip[s], or sneer[s]. D.W. Thompson appears to have been the first to point this out that is, in reference to Ozymandias stating rather matter-of-factly, We nowknow that the Egyptians did not sculpture their kings in such fashion (63). EchoingThompson, Christoph Bode writes, Shelley gives the statue a face that is definitelynot a pharaohs: frown, wrinkled lip, sneer, all indicative of inward passions thatsnowhere near the mild, almost Buddha-like serenity we know from the statues ofEgyptian pharaohs, especially of Ramses II (144). Similarly, Anne Janowitz statesthat the image of passion on Shelleys Ozymandias is unlikely to have beenobserved on the actual Egyptian statuary being shipped to England [in Shelleys day].The head of the Young Memnon, for example, is characteristically impassive inexpression (487). More recently, John Rodenbeck has also made reference to thesmiling expressions on statuary of Ozymandias (126). It seems unlikely, then, if notimpossible, that the face of Shelleys pharaoh derives from any authentic Egyptianstatuary.
Consequently, some scholars have resorted to archetypal readings of Ozymandiassphysiognomy, treating the frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer as constituents of ageneralized physiognomy of tyranny. [T]he face in the sonnet, writes Thompson, isnot that of an Egyptian king, but that of Shelleys tyrant, a Godwinian monarchwhose character has been ruined by court-life (63). For Bode, the face in the sonnetis more suggestive of an archetypal villainous oriental despot like Sardanapalus,by Delacroix, than the pharaohs depicted in ancient Egyptian statuary (144). (HereI cannot help but interject that Bode is of the devils party without knowing it:Delacroixs painting is actually an illustration of Byrons late drama Sardanapalus,whose semi-autobiographical protagonist is a late incarnation of the Byronic hero.)Janowitz reads the face of Ozymandias as an invit[ation] [to] the reader to recreatethe once entire colossus in terms that he or she will understand instead of the stiffmotifs of Egyptian statues, the reader will imagine a tyrant who has a sneer andwhose passions survive the devastation of time (487). For such critics the face ofOzymandias is the face of Tyranny, not of an historical individual, Egyptian or other-wise. Nevertheless, as archetypal as the menacing and haughty facial features of thepharaoh may be, they are also distinctly Byronic.
One more scholarly take on the physiognomy of Ozymandias merits considerationbefore moving on, however. Unconvinced that Shelley fashioned his pharaohafter Pocockes, Edgecombe has argued that Shelley unconsciously drew onJudeo-Christian iconology (95), especially the severed head of Goliath, theattribute of David in a good many paintings, and also the head of Holofernes incomparable tableaux of Judith (97). It is clearly from the Goliath/Holofernes tradi-tion, Edgecombe confidently asserts, and not from Pococke that Shelley has drawnthe idea of a frown / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command (9798). Havingexamined 33 and 28 works in the Judith/Holofernes and David/Goliath traditions, Iwould agree that Ozymandias has affinities with these two Christian iconographical
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traditions more so with the latter than the former but not that they supply the phys-iognomy of Shelleys pharaoh. Severed heads abound, of course, in both traditions,occasionally lying at the feet (David/Goliath) or dangling near the legs (Judith/Holofernes) of the slayer, evoking scenes somewhat reminiscent of Ozymandias.Nevertheless, the face of the respective villains often remains unpictured, eitherbecause the head is turned away from the spectator, is lying face-down in the ground,or is tucked away as spoil in a sack; moreover, when the face is pictured, it is oftenjust as likely to appear peaceful (e.g. the sleeping Holofernes), terrified or excruciat-ingly pained (e.g. Holofernes being decapitated), zombie-like and expressionless(both villains, dead), or even humbled in death (both villains). With all due respect toEdgecombe, the frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer of Ozymandias are not clearlyfrom the Goliath/Holofernes tradition, with which Shelley may or may not have evenbeen very familiar (Edgecombe makes no attempt to document Shelleys exposure tothis tradition; familiarity is assumed, and the influence occurs unconsciously).
To sum up, then, scholars have searched high and low for the origins ofOzymandiass unforgettable physiognomy in the British Museum, in the sands ofEgypt, in textual sources that might have been available to Shelley, in the realmof archetypal evil, and in several Christian iconographical traditions. But theressomething about that sneering face that seems to have slipped though the fingers ofscholars something that gives this Byronist a sense of dj vu.
Byronic Physiognomy: The Byronic Hero, Byron and the Harlow Portrait
Indeed, the frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command of Ozymandiasstrike me as suspiciously Byronic, partially reproducing a constellation of facialfeatures that distinguish both the Byronic hero and Byron himself (or at least one ofthe most compelling personas or images often taken by members of the public to beByron himself, i.e. the 181415 portrait by George Henry Harlow). Let us beginwith art (the Byronic hero) and then move on to life (George Gordon, Lord Byron),not that these categories are discrete in Byrons case.
Debuting in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage 12, catapulting to even greater stardomin the serialized Oriental Tales, returning in cantos 3 and 4 of Childe Harold as wellas in Manfred, and making scattered appearances in the Byron corpus thereafter, theByronic hero was distinguished not only by his aristocratic origins, checkered past,and melancholy (if not misanthropic) disposition, but also by a trademarked physicallook8 that usually included some combination of the following: a curled lip; ascowl, bitter smile, or sneer; a prominent brow; dark, curly hair; fair skin; a penetrat-ing, mesmeric gaze; and a haughty countenance whose cold, detached, or stone-likefront often betrays the vestiges of former passions. The most elaborate portrait of theByronic hero probably appears in The Giaour, whose hero is described by a fisher-man narrator as possessing a sallow front / scathd by fiery passions brunt(19495), an evil or glazed eye (196, 240), a fearful brow (231), skin as paleas marble oer the tomb (238), and a haughty mien (256). Later in the poem,another voice, presumably that of the poet, fleshes out the physiognomy of the Giaoureven further:
Dark and unearthly is the scowlThat glares beneath his dusky cowl The flash of that dilating eye
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Reveals too much of times gone by Oft will his glance the gazer rue For in it lurks that nameless spellWhich speaks itself unspeakable A spirit yet unquelled and highThat claims and keeps ascendancy, others quail beneath his look,Nor scape the glance they scarce can brook.From him the half-affrighted FriarWhen met alone would fain retire As if that eye and bitter smileTransferred to others fear and guile Not oft to smile descendeth he,And when he doth tis sad to seeThat he but mocks at Misery.How that pale lip will curl and quiver!Then fix once more as if for ever As if his sorrow or disdainForbade him eer to smile again. But sadder still it were to traceWhat once were feelings in that face Time hath not yet the features fixed, The common crowd but see the gloomOf wayward deeds and fitting doom The close observer can espyA noble soul, and lineage high. (83269)
Toward the end of the passage, the narrator tropes the Giaour as a grand architecturalruin (no vulgar tenement) that commands the attention of the spectator more insis-tently than the most picturesque (the roofless cot) or sublime (the tower by war ortempest bent) of decaying edifices (87382). Almost immediately thereafter, Byrondirects our gaze, yet another time, back to the stony faade of his threateninglymesmeric hero: Lo! mark ye / / That livid cheek, that stoney air / Of mixeddefiance and despair! (9058).
The same face and demeanor resurface elsewhere in the Byron corpus. Conrad, thehero of The Corsair, possesses a rising lip that reveals / The haughtier thought itcurbs, but scarce conceals (1.2056), a stern glance (1.214), a laughing Devil inhis sneer (1.223), and a frown of hatred (1.225), all of which are complemented bya temperament far too proud to stoop (1.255). The eponymous hero of Lara isdistinguished by his Coldness of mien (1.70), a brow of gloom (1.197), a smilethat often witherd to a sneer (1.299300), and a countenance expressing a vitalscorn of all (1.313). Finally, the Childe Harold of canto 3 exudes a guarded cold-ness (82) and remains [p]roud though in desolation (107). In short, the Byronichero is something of a sublime human ruin a ruin amidst ruins, as Byron wouldlater put it so memorably in Childe Harold 4.25 distinguished by several facialfeatures that later appear on the face of Shelleys pharaoh.
So much for the Byronic hero. But what of Byron himself? Before proceeding,let me explain that the postulate Byron himself requires quotation marks because,as many Byronists would agree, there is no fixed or essential (Beevers 2) physicalappearance or core personality of Byron that has been captured by a single image or
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biographical account. Byrons physical appearance varied dramatically throughout hislife because of an eating disorder, his experimentation with dress and costume, thenatural processes of aging, and the vicissitudes of life. Moreover, he took an impishdelight in striking different poses in different company, sometimes with the intentionof mystifying his future biographers and disrupting the emergence of a stablebiographical account of himself. Finally, the various contemporaries who havebequeathed us their (sometimes conflicting) impressions of Byron inevitablyperceived him through their own subjective lenses. Consequently, literary historiansare left with a notoriously slippery biographical subject.9 To say, then, that Shelleysculpts a portrait of Byron himself, in body or spirit, oversimplifies the matter.
Nevertheless, one particular persona or image of Byron the haughty, sneeringaristocrat tended to predominate in the popular imagination and was frequentlytaken to be Byron himself, and it is this Byron that Shelley caricatures in hissonnet. For convenience I will refer to this Byron as the sublime misanthrope, anepithet purportedly coined by Byron in a conversation with Lady Blessington in whichhe mused upon the contradictory accounts his future biographers would inevitablyproduce given his overabundance of that Protean quality mobilit: One will representme as a sort of sublime misanthrope Another will portray me as a modern DonJuan; and a third as an amiable, ill-used gentleman, more sinned against thansinning (Lovell, Lady Blessingtons 220). Here is a striking portrait of the sublimemisanthrope painted in words in 1814 by the most famous early nineteenth-centuryportraitist in England, Thomas Lawrence, a keen observer of faces (and, as Clubbepoints out, a convert to Johann Caspar Lavaters pseudo-science of physiognomy10):
Lavaters system never asserted its truth more forcibly than in Lord ByronsCountenance, in which you see all the character. Its keen and rapid Genius its paleIntelligence its profligacy and its bitterness, its original symmetry distorted by thePassions, his laugh of mingled merriment and scorn. The forehead, clear and open,the brow boldly prominent, the Eyes bright and dissimilar, the Nose finely cut, and theNostril acutely formd the Mouth well formd but wide, and contemptuous even in itssmile; falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful expression,heightend by the massive firmness of the Chin, which springs at once from the centreof the full under Lip, the Hair dark and curling, but irregular in its growth.
All this presents to you the Poet and the Man (Layard 9495)
Unfortunately for posterity, Lawrence never got to paint Byron in anything butmorphemes (Clubbe 33).
However, one of his pupils, George Henry Harlow (Clubbe 39; Beevers 66),successfully formalized this particular image of the poet for generations to come in asketch undertaken in 181415.11 Described by Beevers as the first wholly RomanticByronic image (68) and the first truly public portrait of Byron, created with a massmarket instead of a private patron in mind (70), Harlows portrait of Byron acquiredinstant vogue when an engraving of it by Henry Meyer appeared in Henry ColburnsThe New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register in July 1815 (Peach, Portraits69; Beevers 66; Kenyon Jones, Fantasy 115).12 As Beevers explains, The dramatictouch [of the portrait] is largely achieved by showing Byron in near profile from astandpoint which has the effect of making the viewer look up at him. This effect isenhanced by the poets glance, which is directed downwards away from the viewerand, it would seem, all other observers (67). Complementing the downward-gazingeye are a slight frown (Peach, Portraits 66) and a full lower lip that make the poet
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appear pouty (Stocking 79n11), aloof (Clubbe 39), brooding (Kenyon Jones,Fantasy 131), and self-indulgent and disdainful (Beevers 68), his persona commu-nicating an air of aristocratic hauteur and boredom (Hyman 226). In what appearsto be a calculated exercise in self-fashioning presumably a collaborative effort byboth artist and sitter the portrait presents Byron as if he were Childe Harold, theGiaour, or Lara in the flesh (Beevers 68; Hyman 226). In the opinion of Henry Angelo,the fencing instructor who encouraged Byron to sit to Harlow, the portrait ascribed toByron a proud, downcast look that was not in the least a trait of the original(Angelo 2: 131), but for many members of the public, especially those who had neverseen the original (and perhaps even for some who had), the Harlow/Meyer imagerepresented the real (or something very close to the real) Lord Byron.
After the image debuted in Colburns magazine, Meyer produced a more refinedversion for publication in Cadell and Davies The British Gallery of ContemporaryPortraits (Beevers 73; see also Peach, Portraits 69). Published on 30 January 1816,the second Meyer engraving came on the heels of the separation scandal Lady Byronhad left Byron on 16 January offering the public an image of Byron that titillatedpresumably because of its apparent confirmation of the worst suspicions regardingByrons dubious character and alleged crimes (Beevers 74). Before long, demand forimages of Byron was so high that cheap pirated versions of the Harlow/Meyer image cruder and coarser versions by anonymous engravers began to spread like wild-fire (Beevers 74). In one such example the quality of the engraving is so poor that thefacial features [of Byron] have degenerated to a degree suggestive of utmost deprav-ity (Beevers 7476).
As the Muse of literary biography would have it, Shelley knew the Harlow/Meyerengraving quite well and he even appears to have taken special note of the imposingimage of Byron offered therein. In her letter to Byron of 29 September 1816, ClaireClairmont Byrons ex-lover and Mary Shelleys step-sister relates a humorous, buttelling, anecdote about the response of the Shelley mnage to an engraving of theimage included in what appears to have been an edition of Poems on His DomesticCircumstances (1816):
We have got the pretty purple poems of Albes [Albe was Claires pet name for Byron]the portrait dear has made you look so proud it almost frightens one even to peep. Weuse it to frighten little Will [Percy and Marys infant son] when he is naughty, telling himthe great Poet is coming. (Stocking 77; see also, 7980n11)
Six months later, in March of 1817, Percy Shelley wrote to his publisher, CharlesOllier, requesting a special print of the engraving:
Mr Hunt has, I believe, commissioned you to get me a proof impression of a print donefrom a drawing by Harlowe of Lord Byron: I said that it should be framed in oak, butI have changed my mind and wish it to be finished in black. (Shelley, Letters 536)
In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), Leigh Hunt recounts tellingByron of an incident in which Mrs. Hunt, while visiting the Shelleys, was shown acopy of the Harlow engraving and asked for her opinion of it, upon which sheremarked that Byron resembled a great school-boy, who had had a plain bun givenhim, instead of a plum one, while Hunt himself refers to the engraving as the fastid-ious, scornful portrait of him [Byron], affectedly looking down (46). WhetherShelley acquired the print for himself or, as Richard Holmes (369) and Annette Peach
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(Portraits 70) claim without offering any evidence, was acting on behalf of Claire;Claires anecdote about the great Poet and Hunts anecdote about his wifes visitwith the Shelleys suggest that Claire, Mary, and Percy were highly amused with theaffectedly Byronic mode of self-representation on display in the portrait a modethat aggressively advertises Lord Byron as the prince of poets, more to be feared thanloved.
Of course, Shelley could have encountered the sublime misanthrope in othervenues besides the Harlow/Meyer engraving. This Byron makes a cameo, for exam-ple, in Caroline Lambs Glenarvon (1816), an anonymous roman clef whose epon-ymous villain sports telltale Byronic facial features (e.g. the proud curl of the upperlip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt [12021; ch. 35]; the contemptuoussneer of his curling lip [148; ch. 42]; etc.). Clearly, as Glenarvon evinces, by 1816,a sneer, curled lip, and haughty demeanor were widely recognized evocations ofByron and the Byronic hero.
Given Shelleys relationship with Byron and the ubiquity of the Byronic look,Shelleys ascription of a frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command toOzymandias should be seen as a deliberate attempt to Byronize the pharaoh, to bringByron into apposition with Ozymandias. The purpose of said Byronization?Presumably, to critique Byron for a number of sometime attitudes that were anathemato Shelley e.g. egotism, aristocratic entitlement, gloom, and misanthropy and tocut down to size the monolithic literary celebrity who had dwarfed Percy Shelley, whohad still not found anything like the critical or popular success enjoyed by Byron.Undoubtedly, the mode of attack involves caricature, not strict mimesis: Shelleysbust is not a dead ringer (physically or temperamentally) for that elusive signifiedByron himself, but an unflattering caricature of Byron, exaggerating the sneer andhaughty demeanor of the Byronic hero and the Harlow engraving, as something evenmore malignant than the sublime misanthrope the sublimest misanthrope, if youwill. Kelvin Everest has also noted a hint of caricatured exaggeration on thepharaohs face, considering this touch to be the sculptors revenge upon the despot(31). Everest is right, of course, about the caricature and revenge, only the sculptorand pharaoh should be read not just as categorical representatives of poets and tyrants,but as alter egos for Shelley and Byron, reflecting the latters ambivalence about andsense of inferiority to the former.
The Art of Image Management: Byronic Portraiture and the Thorvaldsen Bust
If the frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer of Ozymandias signify Byron, thepharaohs obsession with monuments to himself evokes the image managementdriving the profitable industry known as Byronism, which was so dependent uponvisual representations of the poet.13 By the time Shelley was writing Ozymandias,the production and reproduction of Byrons image had been in high gear for severalyears, and Byron had sat sometimes on his own initiative and sometimes at therequest of others to numerous painters and one famous sculptor to produce imagesof himself for both private use and public consumption. Byron usually attempted toretain control of his image by hand-picking the artists for whom he would sit, strik-ing Byronic poses that recalled his fictional heroes, and officially sanctioning orvetoing images for use by Murray or others. (Of course, Byronism occasionally spunout of control, and unauthorized images of the poet inevitably found their way intocirculation.)
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Among the highlights of Byron iconography up to this time were the following:George Sanderss 1809 nautical portrait (on display at the artists studio for about ayear in 180910 and temporarily housed at John Murrays in 1813);14 the two 1813portraits by Richard Westall (one of which was exhibited at the New Gallery in PallMall in 1814 and one of which inspired numerous adaptations including a hack jobby Thomas Blood that gained wide circulation in James Aspernes The EuropeanMagazine for January 1814);15 the well known Thomas Phillips cloak or opencollar portrait of 181314 (which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814 andwhich generated an entire family of Byron replicas);16 Phillipss 1813 three-quarterlength portrait of Byron in Albanian dress (also exhibited at the Royal Academy in1814, enjoying a prominent position in the exhibition and attracting significant atten-tion);17 the aforementioned 181415 profile by Harlow (adapted for sanctioned use,but also frequently pirated, poorly);18 and a series of miniatures by the Italian painterGirolamo Prepiani in 1817.19 Obviously, Shelley would not have been familiar withall of these images, especially the private portraiture; nevertheless, Shelley wouldhave frequently encountered engravings of Byron in editions of his poetry and inpopular magazines, witnessing firsthand the proliferation of Byron iconography andthe self-fashioning being conducted therein.20
Equally pertinent to the present discussion is that Byron sat for his first bust approx-imately six or seven months before Shelley composed Ozymandias. Sometimebetween 29 April and 20 May 1817, at the behest of his friend John Cam Hobhouse,Byron sat to the renowned Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen at his studio inRome (Adams 20507; Beevers 82). Though preceded by a letter from Hobhouse toThorvaldsen, Byron appeared the first day in his atelier without any previous notice,wrapped up in his mantle, and with a look which was intended to impress upon theartist a powerful sentiment of his character, as an English visitor to Thorvaldsensstudio recounted the sculptors saying (Thorwaltzen 232). Byron was an unruly sitterand struck an affectedly Byronic pose, as the aged Thorvaldsen told his friend HansChristian Andersen, who reports the sculptors reminiscence:
Oh, that was in Rome, said he [Thorvaldsen], when I was about to makeByrons statue; he placed himself just opposite to me, and began immediately to assumequite another countenance to what was customary to him. Will not you sit still? said I;but you must not make these faces. It is my expression, said Byron. Indeed? said I, andthen I made him as I wished, and every body said, when it was finished, that I had hit thelikeness. When Byron, however, saw it, he said, It does not resemble me at all; I lookmore unhappy.
He was, above all things, so desirous of looking extremely unhappy, added Thor-waldsen, with a comic expression. (Andersen 170)
Notwithstanding Byrons posturing, his lordships head impressed the sculptor, at leastaccording to Hobhouse, who reported in his letter to Murray of 7 December 1817, theartist worked con amore, and told me it was the finest head he had ever under his hand(Smiles 1: 391). Shortly after the sitting, Hobhouse asked Thorvaldsen to crown thebust with laurels la the great military leaders of Rome the same style thatThorvaldsen had used for his bust of Napoleon (Beevers 92). Somewhat chagrined bythe pretentiousness implicit in sitting for ones bust (to Thorvaldsen no less), Byronobjected to the proposed addition in his letter to Hobhouse of 20 June 1817: I protestagainst & prohibit the laurels which would be a most awkward assumption and
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anticipation of that which may never come to pass. Besides they belong to the butch-ers & not to the ballad-singers (Byron, Letters 5: 243). Hobhouse deferred to Byron,but proved to be merely temporizing: when the marble comes to England,Hobhouse told John Murray in the letter of 7 December, I shall place a golden laurelround it in the ancient style, and, if it is thought good enough, suffix the followinginscription, which may serve at least to tell the name of the portrait and allude to theexcellence of the artist, which very few lapidary inscriptions do (Smiles 1: 391).When the bust, long delayed, finally arrived in England in late October 1821 (Adams210), it was without Hobhouses inscription, a rather lackluster quatrain (Adams 2078; Beevers 93); only Byrons name appeared on the herm, having been placed thereby Thorvaldsen or one of his underlings (Beevers 93).
True, Shelley never saw the Thorvaldsen bust. By October 1821 Shelley hadalready left England permanently and been residing in Italy for several years.Nevertheless, Shelley certainly could have heard of the bust prior to composingOzymandias. (And my argument is not that Ozymandias engages in ekphrasticdescription of the Thorvaldsen bust, which lacks the Byronic sneer, but that thepharaohs obsession with reproducing his own image gestures toward Byronic imagemanagement, which had recently made the jump from portraiture and engraving tostatuary.) Though Byron does not broach the topic in any letter to the Shelleys, andneither of the Shelleys mentions the bust in their letters or journals, news of the sittingcould have easily reached Shelley. During the time between the Thorvaldsen sittingand the composition of Ozymandias, Shelley, who was residing in Marlow, receivedvisitors from London and made several lengthy visits to the metropolis,21 where thelatest intelligence about Byron would have been readily available. After all, Murrayand the Albemarle circle routinely circulated information about Byron as it becameavailable, and Murray had heard of the sitting as early as 4 June 1817 thanks to Byron:Torwaltzen has done a bust of me at Rome for Mr. Hobhouse which is reckonedvery good he is their best after Canova (Byron, Letters 5: 235). If Murray did nottell Douglas Kinnaird and Scrope Davies about the sitting shortly thereafter, it is clearthat Hobhouse had told them by 7 December (see Smiles 1: 391). Clearly, by earlyJuly 1817 Shelley knew, at the very least, that Byron had recently been in Rome:I called on [Samuel] Rogers the other day, Shelley wrote to Byron on 9 July, andheard some news of you, viz. that you had been to Rome, and that you had returnedto Venice (Shelley, Letters 546). That Shelley would not have also heard aboutthe Thorvaldsen sitting sometime before he began composing Ozymandias inDecember 1817 or early January 1818 is indeed hard to imagine. Nevertheless, evenif word of the sitting had not reached Shelley by then, Ozymandias still appears tocriticize Byron for the vanity of the image management sustaining his literary empire,of which Shelley would have been fully aware with or without knowledge of theThorvaldsen bust.22
With its allusion to the tense vis--vis between the despotic pharaoh and thecommissioned sculptor who mock[s] i.e. imitates and/or ridicules thepassions on his subjects face, Ozymandias may even spoof the strange dynam-ics that characterized many of the sittings involving Byron. As Kenyon Jones demon-strates, Byron was a notoriously unruly and affected sitter, his behavior withThorvaldsen being the rule rather than the exception (Fantasy 12425); and manyof Byrons encounters with artists, writes Kenyon Jones, seem to have involvedsomething of a struggle for mastery between the artist and sitter (Introduction 19).In his memoir on the miniaturist James Holmes, who painted Byron on numerous
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occasions (perhaps as early as 1809 and certainly by 181516), Alfred Story reportsHolmess recollections of Byrons behavior at their sittings:
Thus when he [Byron] was sitting for his portraits, he could seldom continue seated orbe still for more than a minute or two at a time. He would be for ever moving about, nowrising and going to the window, now suddenly taking up a stick and beginning to fence.When the artist [Holmes] remonstrated and said he could not paint while he was movingabout like that, he would exclaim with a frown, O blood and guts, do get on! andresume his seat for a brief space. (Story 50)
The painter William Edward West, for whom Byron sat in 1822, described the poet asa bad sitter who assumed a countenance which did not belong to him, as though hewere thinking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold (Lovell, His Very 297). That suchposturing occurred routinely at sittings is also suggested by the comments of contem-poraries such as Robert Charles Dallas, who described the poets facial expression inthe Phillips portraits of 181314 as one of haughtiness and affected dignity neveronce visible to those who ever saw him (qtd. in Walker 1: 80). By all accounts, then,a typical sitting with Byron appears to have involved a considerable amount of self-fashioning and eccentric behavior on the poets part that necessitated no small amountof patience on the artists. Though Shelley was not present at any of Byrons sittingsprior to composing Ozymandias, Regency England was certainly small enough forstories of Byrons demeanor at sittings to have reached Shelley, particularly giventhe commerce between their circles; of course, it would not have required much ofShelley simply to imagine the dynamics between artist and sitter at a sitting involvingLord Byron.
De Casibus Lord Byron
Undoubtedly, as various scholars have pointed out, Ozymandias owes a tremendousdebt to Volneys The Ruins, A Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791) for itsreflections on ruins and the rise and fall of civilizations. Nevertheless, I would arguethat Shelleys concern with the fall of Ozymandias is also indebted to the de casibusliterary tradition inaugurated by Boccaccios De casibus virorum illustrium (135660;revised 1373), the title of which literally means on the falls of illustrious men butwas translated into English by John Lydgate as Fall of Princes (1494). A genre thatflourished in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, and that scholars havetraditionally approached in terms of its relationship to tragedy, de casibus literature,as Paul Budra explains, is a form of history writing that concatenate[s] a series ofannal-type biographies of individuals whose lives demonstrate a pattern of metaba-sis or a change in fortune from good to bad in order to illustrate the vanity ofpride, fame, and ambition in light of the brevity of human life, which is assumedwithin the Christian framework of the de casibus tradition to be a consequence of theFall of Man (13, 1718). Often overtly political in intent, de casibus literature some-times combined the Frstenspiegel (Mirror for Princes, or counsel book) formatwith the exemplary mode to offer a polemical reading of history (Budra xiii; see also19), taking stock of reigns past and instructing rulers both present and future in propergovernance. The genre boasts a rich tradition in English literature that includes Chau-cers The Monks Tale, the de casibus tragedy of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,Lydgates Fall, George Cavendishs Metrical Visions (155254), and the varioussixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of A Mirror for Magistrates (a
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chronological extension of Lydgates work incorporating noteworthy individuals inBritish history), among others (Budra 42, 7, 19). By the time Shelley composedOzymandias, the sun had largely set on the genre, though a new edition of A Mirrorfor Magistrates, edited by Joseph Haslewood, had been published in 1815 (Budra 19).
Certainly, Shelley departs from the de casibus tradition in Ozymandias inseveral important ways. First and foremost, Ozymandias does not affirm a Christianvision of history; the worldview implicit in Shelleys sonnet is more Volneyean, moreexistential all we are is dust in the wind, as Kansas famously put it. Furthermore,Shelley does not resort to the heavy-handed moral rhetoric (Budra 34) prevalent inde casibus literature; instead, he leaves it to the reader to intuit the point from the ironyinhabiting the conclusion (the description of the barren desert, which underminesOzymandiass boast about his Works). This too: Ozymandias does not amass asuccession of lives but instead presents an individual case study what Budra wouldcall a frame if it were part of a series (33) that exemplifies the de casibus theme.But present that theme (i.e. the fall of the mighty) Ozymandias does, and the poemhas palpable affinities with the de casibus tradition, despite its liberties with the genre.
Though not usually couched in such terms, the standard, political reading ofOzymandias is essentially a de casibus reading running something like this:Ozymandias is a warning to kings and tyrants past, present, and future; bothdomestic and foreign that their power will eventually fade, their lives come to anend, their legacies be forgotten. If we attend to the Byronic physiognomy of thepharaoh, however, Ozymandias acquires a strikingly new complexion as a de casi-bus poem. The poem no longer exclusively prognosticates the falls of political princesand their kingdoms but also foretells the fall of a particular literary prince and hisempire: i.e. Byron and Byronism. Like Ozymandias himself, his crumbling statue, andhis long-decayed architectural Works; Lord Byron, his handsomely bound poeticalworks, and the literary/cultural empire known as Byronism will also one daysuccumb to the ravages of Time. Ozymandias morphs from Frstenspiegel, a mirrorfor princes, to something of a Dichterspiegel, or a mirror for poets, lecturing LordByron illustrious man and prince of poets on the vanity of his literary celebrityand future fame.
Making the de casibus tradition a particularly apposite vehicle for Shelleyslecture to Byron, and imbuing it with additional irony, is that Byron had alreadyclaimed to have learned the de casibus lesson from his favorite case study in contem-porary European history: the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. In stanza 17 ofChilde Harolds Pilgrimage 3 a poem Shelley knew well (and the manuscript ofwhich Shelley, acting as Byrons courier, had delivered to John Murray in 1816 afterreturning to England from Switzerland) Harold finds himself at Waterloo in a scenethat, as Rodenbeck has also noticed, seems almost to anticipate Ozymandias (133)with its concern about there being no colossal bust at the field to commemorate thebattle:
Stop! for thy tread is on an Empires dust!An Earthquakes spoil is sepulchered below!Is the spot markd with no colossal bust?Nor column trophied for triumphal show? (17.14548)
Several stanzas later Byron offers a de casibus meditation on Napoleon, the recentlyfallen prince in whom Byron saw himself reflected (particularly after the scandal andself-exile of 1816):
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How in an hour the power which gave annulsIts gifts, transferring fame as fleeting too!In pride of place here last the eagle flew,Then tore with bloody talon the rent plain,Pierced by the shaft of banded nations through;Ambitions life and labours all were vain;He wears the shattered links of the worlds broken chain. (18.15662)
Fallen, yes, but sublimely so Napoleon as well as Byron. Returning to the theme instanza 40, Byron finally puts a face on the ruined emperor one that resembles theartist as much as (if not more than) the sitter:
Ambition steeld thee on too far to showThat just habitual scorn, which could contemnMen and their thoughts; t was wise to feel, not soTo wear it ever on thy lip and brow,And spurn the instruments thou wert to useTill they were turnd unto thine overthrow. (40.35358)
Ascribing the Byronic look to Napoleon, Byron is presumably issuing, vicariously,a mea culpa of sorts, owning up to his own Napoleonic pretensions and acknowledg-ing that he has been the careful pilot of [his] proper woe as he puts it in Epistle toAugusta. But Ozymandias suggests that Shelley was not buying it, that Shelleybelieved the great Poet had not really submitted himself in all proper humility to thede casibus trajectory of life.
Ozymandias Reception Posterity
One of the implications of the reading of Ozymandias offered here is that Shelleyssonnet is a case study in the rampant malaise among Romantic writers that LucyNewlyn has dubbed the anxiety of reception and a significant contribution to whatAndrew Bennett has christened the Romantic culture of posterity. In nicely dove-tailing scholarship, Newlyn and Bennett have argued that many Romantic-period writ-ers suffered from anxiety about their reception because of pressures attending theincreasing commercialization of the literary marketplace (e.g. stiffer competition; agrowing sense of alienation from a rapidly expanding, increasingly unfamiliar audi-ence; mounting pressure to defer to public taste; etc.). To allay these anxieties manywriters sought refuge in a Romantic ideology of genius whose central assumptionwas that the truly great artist might suffer neglect among his contemporaries butwould ultimately be vindicated by posterity. Wordsworth probably furnishes the bestexample of this phenomenon with his prefaces, supplementary essays, and sundryparatexts, which bemoan the debased tastes of the age militating against a properappreciation of his poetic experiment and implicitly or explicitly hold out hope forhis ultimate vindication by posterity. Shelley could strike this chord too, most memo-rably in A Defence of Poetry (1821), which defers poetic fame to a later date: Evenin modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury whichsits in judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed ofhis peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many gener-ations (516). Nevertheless, Shelley had grave doubts about how he would fare in thefuture. Unlike the self-assured Wordsworth, who remained fairly confident of futureexoneration, Shelley, as Bennett points out, expressed acute anxiety and ambivalence
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over his contemporary and future reception (16465; emphasis added). Shelleyrepeatedly articulates the Romantic ideology of poetic neglect, explains Bennett, butis ambivalent in his predictions for his own future name. As [Newman Ivey] Whitecomments, Shelleys letters consistently professed the indifference of a man who felthimself already sentenced to nothing but neglect or abuse (16465). Ozymandiassymptomizes the anxiety of reception that so often plagued Shelley, aroused specif-ically by his nagging sense of inferiority to the best-selling Lord Byron.
This anxiety is registered first and foremost by Shelleys primary alter ego in thepoem, the anonymous sculptor who stands in sharp contrast to the self-advertisingpharaoh. If Byrons avatar in the poem boasts of what Nicholas Mason would call abrand name (My name is Ozymandias) as well as a significant body of (architec-tural/poetic) Works (Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!), Shelleys repre-sentative plies his trade in anonymous obscurity, reflecting Shelleys failure to attainanything like Byrons meteoric success or name recognition.23 Joining the sculptor,however, are several other anonymous or self-deprecatingly pseudonymous figures the traveller and the poet Glirastes (which probably means lover of theDormouse, Dormouse being Percys pet name for Mary [Pollin 365]) who alsofunction as alter egos for Shelley (particularly in his role as the author of Ozymandias)inasmuch as they are nobodies24 in relation to the illustrious man on whom theyreport in their respective media (travel narratives and poetry). The tack that Shelleytakes in attempting to allay his anxiety about Byron is fittingly, given Byrons closeassociation with decaying architecture (think Childe Harolds Pilgrimage) to ruinhim,25 to erect a statue of him and subject it to the ravages of Time, to depict the inev-itable future fall of the literary empire of the great Poet whom Shelley oftendespaired of rivaling. The consolation, then, that Shelley finds in Ozymandias is thecertainty that Byron cannot live and his poetic Works cannot endure forever, fornothing endures forever.
Of secondary consolation, of course, is the subversive pleasure that Shelley takesin mock[ing]26 Lord Byron that is, in caricaturing him as the sublimest misan-thrope with a reasonable expectation of impunity (by assuming the pseudonymGlirastes and by camouflaging the critique of Byron in the veil of Egyptian subjectmatter) and with the faint hope that his (i.e. Shelleys) own Works (perhaps evenOzymandias itself) might one day inspire despair among the Mighty (otherrivals for poetic fame, perhaps even Byron himself). In other words, the famousinscription on the pedestal of Ozymandiass statue (My name is Ozymandias, Kingof Kings, / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!), with its slippery pronounmy, is a double-voiced boast27 that asks to be interpreted in both of the followingways: read as originating with the sitter, the boast undercuts Byrons pretensions topermanency since all of the pharaohs Works have reverted to sand; read as havingbeen co-opted by the sculptor (my Works referring, secondarily, to the sculptors),the boast articulates the hope (albeit a dim one) that Shelleys works might endurewhile simultaneously celebrating the subversive artistic achievement of Ozymandiasitself, which mocks Byron right before his (and our) very eyes, subtly enough forShelley to maintain plausible deniability.
Consequently, Ozymandias makes a unique contribution to the Romanticculture of posterity by (fore)telling a tale of two poets the inevitable fall of one,and what would appear to be the continuing obscurity of another (one who is indeedtalented, but whose hopes for a potential rise seem unlikely at best). Undoubtedly,the emphasis in the poem is on the fate of the former poet rather than on that of the
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latter that is, Shelley devotes considerably more attention to Byrons fall thanto his own dubious fate but the future does not seem to bode well for Shelley.Reflecting Shelleys awareness of his lack of contemporary celebrity as well as hisprofound doubts about his prospects for future fame, the sculptor (even if he is gifted)remains as anonymous several millennia later as he was while alive. The poem neverdepicts a day when the sculptor actually manages to attain a name for himself or toeclipse the fame of the pharaoh. All the sculptor can do is surreptitiously underminethe pharaoh and timidly voice a faint and distant hope that his Works, whichpresumably will never be recognized as his, might endure. la other exemplars ofthe Romantic culture of posterity say, Wordsworths Essay, Supplementary to thePreface (1815) or Shelleys own A Defence of Poetry (1821) Ozymandias appealsto Time for vindication, but Time does not seem particularly inclined to grant PercyShelley the laurels; Time merely topples decapitates, in fact the illustrious manwho had bested Shelley in his own day. If Shelleys earlier sonnet To Wordsworthconstitutes an act of literary patricide in which Shelley kills off his poetic father,Wordsworth, Ozymandias is nothing less than a prophetic act of literary fratricidein which Cain slays Abel or, rather, in which Ariel slays Cain.
The Empire Strikes Back?
If Ozymandias constitutes a veiled de casibus meditation on the vanity of Byronsliterary celebrity, several questions immediately present themselves. First, did Byronsuspect that he was being spoken of or to in the poem? Second, did Byron venture areply? Unfortunately, these questions cannot be answered with certainty, but punctu-ating the end of canto 1 of Don Juan (1819) is a sobering meditation on fame thatreads like a response to Ozymandias:28
What is the end of fame? tis but to fillA certain portion of uncertain paper: For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,And bards burn what they call their midnight taper,To have, when the original is dust,A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust. (1.218)
What are the hopes of man? old Egypts KingCheops erected the first pyramidAnd largest, thinking it was just the thingTo keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;But somebody or other rummaging,Burglariously broke his coffins lid:Let not a monument give you or me hopes,Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops. (1.219)
Protesting, I would argue, the de casibus spanking Shelley had given him inOzymandias, Byron offers up a de casibus meditation of his own, also starring apharaoh, in which he denies Shelleys charges, disavowing any Ozymandian preten-sions to permanency29 despite his unparalleled literary celebrity (A name), theproliferation of his image in portraiture and engravings (a wretched picture), and hisdecision to sit to Thorvaldsen for the bust (worse bust). It would seem that Jean-Franois Byron might have deciphered the Ozymandias stone long before werealized it was written in hieroglyphics.
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An entry in Detached Thoughts, Byrons journal, evinces a lingering chagrin overthe Thorvaldsen bust in language that asks one to entertain such a possibility. Whenthe young Bostonian Thomas Coolidge made a pilgrimage to Italy in October of 1821to see Byron and revealed that he had procured a copy of the Thorvaldsen bust, Byronrecorded the following thoughts in his journal:
I confess I was more flattered by this young enthusiasm of a solitary trans-atlantic trav-eller than if they had decreed me a Statue in the Paris Pantheon (I have seen Emperorsand demagogues cast down from their pedestals even in my own time & Grattansname razed from the Street called after him in Dublin). (Byron, Letters 9: 2021)
A human tourist destination residing in an antique land and attracting a travellerof his own, Byron seems acutely aware that ones monumental self may not have apedestal to stand on in the future. Byron then adds,
I would not pay the price of a Thorwaldsen bust for any human head & shoulders except Napoleons or my childrens or some absurd Womankinds as Monkbarnscalls them or my Sisters. If asked why then I sate for my own answer that itwas at the request particular of J.C. Hobhouse Esqre. and for no one else. A pictureis a different matter every body sits for their picture but a bust looks like putting uppretensions to permanency and smacks something of a hankering for public fame ratherthan private remembrance. (Byron, Letters 9: 21)
Concerned that sitting for the Thorvaldsen bust might be construed by others asputting up pretensions to permanency, Byron placed responsibility squarely onHobhouses shoulders, claiming that he had merely been indulging his friend. It iscertainly understandable that encountering an admirer who actually owned a copyof the Thorvaldsen bust might have made Byron feel self-conscious about thewhole affair, but, given Don Juan 1.21819, one wonders if Byrons lingeringmisgivings about the Thorvaldsen bust were exacerbated by an insightful reading ofOzymandias.30
***
Long a routine stop on the grand tour of British Romantic literature, Ozymandiasnow asks to be revisited by adventurous literary travelers as a de casibus poem not justabout the falls of despots, but about the inevitable future fall of the most famous liter-ary celebrity of the nineteenth century, the illustrious Lord Byron. By chiselingaway more rock than is typical of ancient Egyptian statuary a nip here, a tuck there and endowing Ozymandias with a teasingly familiar frown, / And wrinkled lip, andsneer of cold command, Percy Shelley has given his pharaoh a celebrity-inspiredfacelift, making him in the image of Byron. By decapitating Byrons head fromthe ruined colossus, though, citizen Shelley prophesies the day when the great Poetwho awoke one morning and found [him]self famous would cease to enjoy prideof place in the Pantheon of poets, bequeathing us a picture of Byrons literary celeb-rity on the rocks. Dwarfed by the monolithic literary celebrity of Lord Byron, Shelleyappealed for vindication to Time. And in Ozymandias Time is the guillotine onwhich the literary monarch of the early nineteenth century finally loses his crown.31
Ironically, though, despite Shelleys near inability in Ozymandias to imagine a daywhen the anonymous sculptor might rival the pharaoh and win an enduring name forhimself, Time has vindicated Percy Shelley, who no longer plays second Aeolian harp
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to Lord Byron. The true identity of Glirastes is, if not quite a household name inthe twenty-first century, certainly a big name among those who still appreciatesomething called Romantic poetry. Of course, given the death of the author, thedismantling of the Big Six, and the pace of disciplinary erosion over the last fewdecades, this, too, may be vanity.
Notes1. The best critical book-length studies on Shelley and Byron are by Robinson and Brewer.
Gilmours The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time is insightful, but itconcludes with 1812, several years before Shelley and Byron even met. Dated, and morebiographical than critical, are the studies by Clarke, Whipple, and Buxton. Behrendtsrecap of the Byron-Shelley conversation (16974) is concise and insightful. As for articles,which are usually of relatively limited scope and far too numerous to list here, the recentcontribution by Peter Cochran stands out for its comprehensiveness. In my research I havefound only five attempts most of them brief to bring Byron to bear upon Ozymandias.In The Dream of the Moving Statue (1992), Gross comments that [Ozymandias] responds to Byrons exactly contemporary descriptions of ancient ruins in Manfred andChilde Harold, especially insofar as Shelley exorcises the slightly sentimental pathos theolder poet invested in the ghosts of dead kings inhabiting such ruins (51). In Ozyman-dias: The Riddle of the Sands (1998), Brown suggests that the images of stamping andwrinkles in Ozymandias echo Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, 2.98, which reads, What isthe worst of woes that wait on age? / What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? / Toview each lovd one blotted from lifes page, / And be alone on earth, as I am now (55).The other three attempts to bring Ozymandias and Byron into dialogue those byBennett, Rodenbeck, and Cochran I will discuss later in this article.
2. Brewer prefers the term conversation, arguing that Robinsons debate over-emphasizesthe philosophical antagonism between the two poets (Brewer ix).
3. By coincidence, Clubbe engages in some similar punning on Keatss famous cuts afigure phrase while discussing the word-Byrons created by Shelley and other contem-poraries of Byron (4849).
4. Smiths sonnet originally titled Ozymandias but changed to On a Stupendous Leg ofGranite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription InsertedBelow appeared in the Examiner shortly thereafter on 1 February 1818.
5. All quotations from Shelleys poetry and prose are taken from the edition by Reiman andFraistat unless otherwise noted.
6. Reiterated, in greater detail, in Rodenbeck (12426).7. I make this claim having consulted source studies by Thompson, Pettit, Griffiths, Parr,
Notopoulos, Richmond, Quinn, Nablow, Waith, and Venables.8. Beevers uses the phrase the Byronic look (68) in his discussion of George Henry
Harlows 181415 sketch of Byron, touching on some of these characteristics but empha-sizing the sartorial details of the portrait.
9. On the elusiveness of Byrons physical appearance and character, see Kenyon Jones(Fantasy); Peach (Portraits, 1, 1117); Beevers (2, 6); Hyman (204, 210, 234); andClubbe (36, 40, 23031, 244).
10. In light of the ninth chapter (Lavaters Physiognomy and Sullys Byron) of John ClubbesByron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (2005), I should mention that Shelleys attentionto facial detail in Ozymandias is coeval with the rise of physiognomy, the pseudo-scienceof face-reading founded by the Swiss divine Johann Caspar Lavater (17411801). AlthoughMary Wollstonecraft (Shelleys mother-in-law) collaborated with Thomas Holcroft on themost popular English edition of Lavaters works, Essays on Physiognomy, published in1793 (Clubbe 212), Shelley does not appear to have been a convert to physiognomy as faras I can tell. Nevertheless, Shelley almost certainly would have been familiar with Lavaterstheories given their pervasiveness (and perhaps via the connection through Wollstonecraft),and it is hard to imagine that Shelley was not attempting to capitalize on the popularity ofphysiognomy in Ozymandias, at least to some extent, with the description of thepharaohs face, which is meant to be indicative of his character. Moreover, the Byronic
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look on display in Ozymandias was itself deeply rooted in the popularity of physiog-nomy: as Clubbe points out, the Byronic hero drew on physiognomy to describe emotionalstates (214). Presumably, Ozymandias both reflects and perpetuates the contemporaryobsession with physiognomy in general and Byronic physiognomy in particular.
11. Reproduced in Peach, Portraits (n.p., Figs. 41, 42, 45) and Beevers (72, Fig. 25).12. Peach, the most comprehensive and authoritative source, claims that the engraving
appeared as the frontispiece to the July 1815 issue; Beevers claims that the engravingappeared in the August 1815 issue. In the microfilm copy of The New Monthly Magazineand Universal Register that I personally examined, the engraving appears in neither theJuly (number 18; the last number in Vol. 3) nor the August (number 19; the first numberin Vol. 4) issues but (presumably in accordance with the instructions To Face the Title.Vol. 3 appearing in the upper right hand corner of the page containing the engraving) hasbeen relocated to and bound facing the title page for Vol. 3 itself, which contains numbers13 (Feb. 1815) through 18 (July 1815). The engraving itself suggests a publication date ofAugust, reading London. Published Augt. 1st 1815. by H. Colburn. Conduit Street, butperhaps the engraving ran early, appearing in the July issue as Peach claims.
13. On Byron iconography, see the catalogs by Peach (Portraits) and Walker, the former beingthe more comprehensive of the two; the excellent book-length study of the major portraitureand sculpture by Beevers; the articles by Kenyon Jones (Fantasy and James Holmes),Mole, Peach (Controlling), Bainbridge, and Adams; Clubbes overview (3350); and thenew collection of essays edited by Kenyon Jones (Byron: The Image of the Poet). OnByronism as an industry, see Christensen (esp. xx, 5, 88, 130, 172, 174, and 21415).
14. Bainbridge (15, 20); Beevers (15); Peach (Famous 61).15. Mole (98102); Beevers (5365). Other adaptations of Westall include Charles Turners
mezzotint dated 20 May 1814 and James Heaths engraving published in The LadysMagazine in April 1815 (Peach, Famous 62).
16. Quote from Kenyon Jones (Fantasy 131); see also Peach (Famous 63) and Beevers(24, 34).
17. Kenyon Jones (Fantasy 129); Beevers (26); Peach (Famous 64).18. (Beevers 6676).19. Peach (Controlling 1314, 16).20. On the impact and ubiquity of Byrons image, Peach writes, the portraiture of Byron was
more widely disseminated through reproductions, and made a stronger visual and culturalimpact in Britain and Europe than those of any other literary figure (Famous, 65).
21. According to Holmes, Shelley briefly visited London at the end of May 1817 (371) andspent the last week of September (377), the first three weeks of October (380), and most ofNovember there (383, 389). During the time between the Thorvaldsen sitting and thecomposition of Ozymandias, Shelley had contact both in London and in Marlow witha host of literati, including Hunt, Godwin, Henry Crabb Robinson, John Murray, andCharles Ollier (36791).
22. Though reflections on poetic fame are no doubt predisposed to advert to the head of thepoet given its association with the laurels, the portrait of Byron in Adonais (1821)referred to earlier in this paper i.e., The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame / Over his livinghead like Heaven is bent / An early but enduring monument, / Came (26467) invitesadditional speculation about Shelleys knowledge of the Thorvaldsen bust and, consideredin light of the word-bust of Byron in Ozymandias, points to a persistent concern with thehead of the famous Lord Byron.
23. In his own eyes, Shelleys name was either unknown or execrated; see, for example,Shelleys letter to Leigh Hunt of 8 December 1816, in which Shelley states that Hymn toIntellectual Beauty deserves a better fate than the being linked with so stigmatised &unpopular a name (so far as it is known) as mine (Shelley, Letters 517).
24. Young describes the traveler and Glirastes as nobodies who are dwarfed by Ozymandias,the difference of scale [being] suggested by Glirastes own name (241).
25. See Grosss comment, quoted in note 1 of this article, that Ozymandias responds toByrons description of ruins in Manfred and Childe Harolds Pilgrimage.
26. On the sculptors mockery of the pharaoh, see Everest (31), Freedman (69), Young (239),Austin (34) and (4243), and Brown (5456).
27. Austin also argues that the boast does double duty for the pharaoh and the sculptor (42),reading works as a reference to Shelleys poetical works, Ozymandiass boast being
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[Shelleys] own defiant and derisory gesture in the face of the rebuffs he had experiencedin 1817 at the hands of authority, respectability, and conservatism (4243) but noting thateven our sculptors works were doomed from the beginning to long-term decay, a factthat renders his moral victory over Ozymandias temporary at best (42).
28. Bennett states that Don Juan (1.219) parodically echoes Shelleys Ozymandias (196),but Bennett does not clarify whether parodically implies ridicule or merely resemblance,nor does he note any concern with Byron in Ozymandias. More recently, Peter Cochranhas discussed Don Juan (1.21819) as an answer or corollary to Ozymandias (par.87) in which Byron corrects Shelley for failing to recognize that it is not just the ambitionsof tyrants that will come to naught but even those of poets such as themselves: But forByron, Shelley has missed the point. The lesson of Ozymandias is a lesson not just for thebad guys, but for Shelley, for him, Byron, and for everyone. Poets, whether acknowledgedas legislators or not, will, along with kings, all come to this (par. 89). Obviously, I believethat Shelley understood this truth, that Ozymandias is a lesson for Byron, and that Byronsuspected he had been lumped in with the bad guys in Ozymandias.
29. Presumably by coincidence, Everest echoes Byrons phrase when he refers to Ozymandiasspretension to permanence in the commissioning of such a monument, with such an inscrip-tion (31); Everest makes no connection between Ozymandias and Byron.
30. Whatever the case, as Beevers explains, Byrons qualms did not prevent him from sittingfor a second ad vivum bust his last in January 1822, this time to the famous Florentinesculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, who had also sculpted Napoleon. As part of Byrons Pisancircle, Percy Shelley would have dined at Byrons table with Bartolini and other guests(Beevers 108). What Shelley thought of this affair is a mystery nothing of that remains.
31. Young remarks that the decapitated head of Ozymandias uncannily anticipates the guillo-tined bodies of the French Revolution (238).
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