The Romantic poets: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley This week, the Guardian and the Observer are running a series of seven pamphlets on the Romantic poets. To coincide with it, I'm blogging daily on one of each day's selected works

Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley Passion for politics and Egyptology. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images The Shelleys' circle enjoyed setting each other themed writing contests: the most famous work to have emerged from such a pastime is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It's less well-known that Shelley's most famous short poem, Ozymandias, was the result of a competition between himself and his friend Horace Smith, a financier, verse-parodist and author of historical novels. Smith's rival sonnet is called, less memorably, In Egypt's Sandy Silence and disadvantages itself early on by the gauche reference to "a gigantic leg". Somehow, Shelley's "two vast and trunkless legs" are more impressive. But both poems, first Shelley's and then Smith's, were published by Leigh Hunt early in 1818 in consecutive issues of his monthly journal The Examiner. Shelley's interest in Egyptology was already established, as revealed by some of the imagery of an earlier poem, Alastor, but perhaps it had been rekindled in part by the news of the excavation of the colossal head of Rameses II. This head would later be shipped to the British Museum. Shelley could not have seen it at the time of writing, and he had never been to Egypt, but he would have certainly seen illustrations of ruined cities and statues. The various literary sources of the poem are fascinatingly explored in this essay which suggests that Volney's The Ruins of Empires (a French work appearing in English translation in 1792) was of major significance, and not only to Ozymandias. "The book was central to the evolution of Romanticism from a specifically English and insular aesthetic to a universal political and philosophical force," writes the anonymous author. As potently as the wilderness symbolised spiritual freedom for the Romantic writers, ancient ruins declared the triumph of time and nature over human tyranny. A competition, light-heartedly undertaken, may have been the sonnet's immediate occasion, but Shelley's passion for the politics of his theme is evident in the poem and integral to its solidity. Whether a writer is drawing on personal experience or literary research, imagination is crucial, and Shelley approaches the task with great imaginative flair. First, he sets a fictional scene, introducing a second character, a kind of Ancient Mariner, though one with the gift of brevity, to give his "personal account" of the ruined sculpture. Virtually all the sonnet is spoken by the traveller. His tale is strongly pictorial, and moves with the fluency and drive of recollection. Shelley's free, "romantic" way with the sonnet-form – the unusual pattern of the rhymes, and the presence of half-rhymes – is wholly appropriate. Another character in the poem is Ozymandias himself, his whole personality summed up in a few strokes. He seems to have had little facial resemblance to the benign, serenely smiling pharaoh familiar to visitors to the British Museum. Shelley has created a monster, it seems, out of his own revulsion from tyranny. The "wrinkled lip" is a particularly brilliant detail that suggests an age of sneering and sensuality in its possessor. There is a third character, of course: the sculptor who, it seems, has revealed his master's true nature, and, moreover, must be responsible for the telling second half of the inscription: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" The full irony of this is brought home by the final image of the boundless sands, stretching as far as the eye can see. If there is little left of the sculptor's work, there is enough, so far, to bear witness to tyranny. Of the tyrant's works, nothing remains. Russian poets used to have a saying that the poet outlives the tsar. Here, the sculptor outlives the pharaoh, at least until nature reclaims the last vestiges of masonry, and these, too, are dissolved to sand. Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said – 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, 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 Which yet survive (stamped on these lifeless things) The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.'