When the poem begins, "I met a traveler...," is the reader being invited to identify that "I" with P. Shelley himself? Would that have been the prevailing reading? Did Shelley settle the question elsewhere?

To put it another way, is Shelley's poem performance art and analogous to stand-up comedy? When e.g. Henny Youngman jokes, "take my wife, please!" we understand that he's almost certainly not sincere about desiring to be rid of his wife, but we do understand that the woman we're being facetiously offered is Mrs Youngman, that the "me" whose wife is at issue is the real man Henny Youngman, that he is not speaking as a fictional character.

Is the narrator of "Ozymandias" similarly supposed to be the very same person as our own Husband-of-Frankenstein's-Author?

When the poem begins, "I met a traveler...," is the reader being invited to identify that "I" with P. Shelley himself? Would that have been the prevailing reading? Did Shelley settle the question elsewhere?

To put it another way, does Shelley's "I" signal performance art in a way that's analogous to stand-up comedy? When e.g. Henny Youngman jokes, "take my wife, please!" we understand that he's almost certainly not sincere about desiring to be rid of his wife, but we do understand that the woman we're being facetiously offered is Mrs Youngman, that the "me" whose wife is at issue is the real man Henny Youngman, that he is not speaking as a fictional character.

Is the narrator of "Ozymandias" similarly supposed to be the very same person as our own Husband-of-Frankenstein's-Author?

I mean, when the poem begins, "I met a traveler...," is the reader being invited to identify that "I" with P. Shelley himself? Would that have been the prevailing reading? Did Shelley settle the question elsewhere?

When e.g. Henny Youngman jokes, "take my wife, please!" we understand that he's almost certainly not sincere about desiring to be rid of his wife, but we do understand that the woman we're being facetiously offered is Mrs Youngman, that the "me" whose wife is at issue is the real man Henny Youngman, that he is not speaking as a fictional character.

Is the narrator of "Ozymandias" supposed to be the very same person as our own Husband-of-Frankenstein's-Author?

When the poem begins, "I met a traveler...," is the reader being invited to identify that "I" with P. Shelley himself? Would that have been the prevailing reading? Did Shelley settle the question elsewhere?

To put it another way, is Shelley's poem performance art and analogous to stand-up comedy? When e.g. Henny Youngman jokes, "take my wife, please!" we understand that he's almost certainly not sincere about desiring to be rid of his wife, but we do understand that the woman we're being facetiously offered is Mrs Youngman, that the "me" whose wife is at issue is the real man Henny Youngman, that he is not speaking as a fictional character.

Is the narrator of "Ozymandias" similarly supposed to be the very same person as our own Husband-of-Frankenstein's-Author?