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[A]lthough the "I" of such a lyric does not necessarily, or not absolutely, represent the poet himself, it also does not represent anyone else, either—unlike the "I" of "My Last Duchess" or "Ulysses" or other dramatic monologues. A characteristic feature of the lyric "I" is precisely this vagueness that allows the reader to equate it with the poet, perhaps; to identify with it himself, or herself; to see it as a universal "I" belonging to no one and to everyone. Thus the lyric, as Sharon Cameron suggests, "is a departure ... from the finite constrictions of identity," positing a speaker whose "origin remains deliberately unspecified."† The "I" who "wandered lonely as a cloud" can refer to Wordsworth, or to any reader or reciter of the poem."

_{Howe, p. 6.}

_{†Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. p. 208. Quoted in Howe, p. 6.}

As Howe notes, the the lyric utterance is distinct from dramatic monologues such as Browning's "My Last Duchess" or Tennyson's Ulysses, wherein the poet identifies some third person as the speaker of the poem;. She also says that some lyrics, such Byron's "January 22nd, Missalonghi" clearly signal an autobiographical context. Byron's poem is subtitled "On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year," specifying that the speaker is to be identified with the poet. In Wordsworth's poem, however, the identification of speaker with writer, or poetic subject with historical, is unsupported by any relevant evidence provided within or alongside the poem itself.

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them.

_{Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. 1800–1803. Ed. Pamela Woof. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Entry for 15 April 1802. p. 85. Accessed at archive.org 23 May 2024.}

Wordsworth's 1804 poem was inspired by his reading this diary entry, so it does in fact have an autobiographical basis. But what immediately strikes the attentive reader is the liberties Wordsworth takes with this incident. The poet says he was alone when he saw the daffodils: "I wandered lonely." To wonder whether Wordsworth is misremembering, or to accuse him of lying, would be naïve. Rather than assume that a poem makes the same truth claims as reportage, we should recognize that the speaker of the poem is not Wordsworth, but a representation; and that the biographical fact is fictionalized in its poetic recreation.

Certainly there are cases where knowing the biographical context for a poem brings out layers of meaning that are otherwise obscured. Take, for example, Vikram Seth's "Unclaimed". A poem that begins with the stark announcement that "To make love with a stranger is the best" and talks of being "unclaimed by fear of imminent day" will be misread until one realizes that Seth wrote this poem while living in San Francisco in the mid-1980s as a bisexual man at the height of the AIDS crisis. The careful lack of specification regarding the lovers' genders, easy to overlook without this context, becomes meaningful with it. So does the phrase "the beat of foreign heart to heart," where Seth's own foreignness as an Indian in the US informs the adjective. It's worth thinking about "heart to heart" as well—two closeted strangers probably can open up to each other in a way that is impossible outside this intimate situation.

Seth's poem does not use the first person pronoun at all; the speaker's voice would be almost that of an observer, if not for the longing for intimacy suggested by words like "aching," "fear," and "rest." But even in poems where the voice is autobiographical practically to the point of nakedness, the categorical break between the real poet and the imagined speaker pertains. Take, for example, Silvia Plath's "Daddy." When the speaker says, "Daddy, I have had to kill you," do we assume that Plath murdered her father? And is the last stanza to be taken literally?

The point of the above readings is to show that no matter how close the identification between speaker and poet, the poem is a performance relying on a persona. This persona is fictional. It is not meant to be a literal or biographical depiction of the poet. Even when biographical signposts are available (as they are in varying degrees for all four poets, Wordsworth, Byron, Seth, and Plath), those markers tell us about the lyrical utterance or the poetic performance–i.e., about the poem, not the poet.

Let's bring this back to Shelley's poem. The statue described in the sonnet is one of the two colossi that flanked the mortuary temple of the pharoah Rameses II, known to the ancient Greeks as Ozymandius, in the Theban necropolis. When Shelley's poem was written, one of the pair, known as the Younger Memnon, was en route to London after having been looted from its original location. (As the joke goes: "Why are the pyramids in Egypt? They were too big to ship to the British Museum.) The statue arrived in March 1818, two months after Shelley's sonnet was published. And since Shelley never went to Egypt, he could not have seen the statue in its original location either.

He may have read Diodorus in the original Greek, or in translation, or as quoted by one of the travel writers Parr mentions. But the presence of this inscription in the poem demonstrates that Shelley's account is literary—that the fragments that compose this statue are textual rather than lithic.

We know from Mary Shelley's journal that Smith had paid Percy and Mary Shelley a brief visit on 26—28th December. The proximity of this visit to the publication of both poems has led critics to speculate that the poems were written as a friendly competition, where Smith and Shelley each tried their hand at a sonnet on the theme of Diodorus's description of the statue. It is known that Shelley's circle indulged in such competitions—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the sonnets on the Nile by Percy Shelley, Keats, and Hunt having resulted from similar challenges. The imminent arrival of the Younger Memnon in London was the spur for the Nile poems, and perhaps underwrites Smith's and Shelley's "Ozymandias" sonnets as well. All of this lends credence to the speculation that the latter sonnets were the result of a similar competition, and the speculation is often treated as fact. Here, for example, is John Rodenbeck:

The great sonnet was published on 11 January 1818. It had apparently been written barely two weeks earlier. The occasion of its composition is now well known. At his house near Marlowe on Saturday 27 December 1817, the day after Boxing Day, Shelley entertained Horace Smith (1779–1849), whom he had met at Leigh Hunt's the previous year. Smith was equally talented as a financier, a verse parodist, and an author of historical novels. The talk seems to have drifted around to Egyptian antiquity and to Diodorus Siculus ... and a friendly competition ensued in which each writer was to produce a sonnet on the subject of "Ozymandias, the King of Kings."

_{Rodenbeck, John. “Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley’s Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias’”. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 24, 2004, pp. 121–48. Accessed at JSTOR, 24 May 2024.}

It's worth noting, however, that neither Mary Shelley's journal nor Smith's lengthy account of his visit mentions any such competition. As Rodenbeck mentions, Smith was a gifted parodist, which suggests that he was able to come up with responses to existing poems quickly and skillfully. It's equally plausible that Smith read Shelley's sonnet and produced one on the same theme, rather than both poems having been composed simultaneously in a friendly match.

With no actual evidence that a competition was ever undertaken, it's pretty remarkable that critic after critic has presented the competition as established fact. This reveals, once again, the unreliability of using poems as evidence for incidents in the poet's life. Going from the two Ozymandias poems to any sort of biographical conclusion about the poets leads into hazard. And remarkably fruitless hazard, at that. How does the existence or non- of such a competition help us read Shelley's "Ozymandias"? It probably doesn't add to our understanding of the poem either way.

Contrariwise, what if we assume that the poem is autobiographical, that Shelley is faithfully reporting an actual conversation with someone returned from Egypt. Would we understand "Ozymandias" differently? Here too I'd venture probably not. The third possibility, that Shelley is imaginatively combining fragments he has read into an original composition, comes closer to helping our understanding: if we could confidently identify Shelley's sources for the poem, perhaps we could say whether the "traveler from an antique land" is Diodorus, or one of the other writers of Egyptian travelogues Shelley read.

As we've seen, we can't read Shelley's biography from "Ozymandias." That's begging the question: the poem isn't evidence of anything about Shelley's life. Based on what we do know about Shelley—namely, that he'd never been to Egypt and had never seen any statue of Rameses II—this poem is also resistant to being read in the light of his personal experiences. So while the biographical approach to examining the lyric persona can be fruitful in some cases (Seth, for example), here it seems like a dead-end.

[A]lthough the "I" of such a lyric does not necessarily, or not absolutely, represent the poet himself, it also does not represent anyone else, either—unlike the "I" of "My Last Duchess" or "Ulysses" or other dramatic monologues. A characteristic feature of the lyric "I" is precisely this vagueness that allows the reader to equate it with the poet, perhaps; to identify with it himself, or herself; to see it as a universal "I" belonging to no one and to everyone. Thus the lyric, as Sharon Cameron suggests, "is a departure ... from the finite constrictions of identity," positing a speaker whose "origin remains deliberately unspecified."† The "I" who "wandered lonely as a cloud" can refer to Wordsworth, or to any reader or reciter of the poem.

_{Howe, p. 6.}

_{†Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. p. 208. Quoted in Howe, p. 6.}

As Howe notes, the the lyric utterance is distinct from dramatic monologues such as Browning's "My Last Duchess" or Tennyson's Ulysses, wherein the poet identifies some third person as the speaker of the poem. She also points out that some lyrics, such Byron's "January 22nd, Missalonghi" clearly signal an autobiographical context. Byron's poem is subtitled "On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year," specifying that the speaker is to be identified with the poet. In Wordsworth's poem, however, the identification of speaker with writer, or poetic subject with historical, is unsupported by any relevant evidence provided within or alongside the poem itself.

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the Lake to them.

_{Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. 1800–1803. Ed. Pamela Woof. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Entry for 15 April 1802. p. 85. Accessed at archive.org 23 May 2024.}

Wordsworth's 1804 poem was inspired by his reading this diary entry, so it does in fact have an autobiographical basis. But what immediately strikes the attentive reader is the liberties Wordsworth takes with this incident. The speaker says he was alone when he saw the daffodils: "I wandered lonely." To wonder whether Wordsworth is misremembering, or to accuse him of lying, would be naïve. Rather than assume that a poem makes the same truth claims as reportage, we should recognize that the speaker of the poem is not Wordsworth, but a representation; and that the biographical fact is fictionalized in its poetic recreation.

Certainly there are cases where knowing the biographical context for a poem brings out layers of meaning that are otherwise obscured. Take, for example, Vikram Seth's "Unclaimed". A poem that begins with the stark announcement that "To make love with a stranger is the best" and talks of being "unclaimed by fear of imminent day" will be misread until one realizes that Seth wrote this poem while living in San Francisco in the mid-1980s as a bisexual man at the height of the AIDS crisis. The careful lack of specification regarding the lovers' genders, easy to overlook without this context, becomes meaningful within it. So does the phrase "the beat of foreign heart to heart," where Seth's own foreignness as an Indian in the US informs the adjective. It's worth thinking about "heart to heart" as well—two closeted strangers probably can open up to each other in a way that is impossible outside this intimate situation.

Seth's poem does not use the first person pronoun at all. The speaker's voice would be almost that of an observer, if not for the longing for intimacy suggested by words like "aching," "fear," and "rest." But even in poems where the voice is autobiographical practically to the point of nakedness, the categorical break between the real poet and the imagined speaker pertains. Take, for example, Silvia Plath's "Daddy." When the speaker says, "Daddy, I have had to kill you," do we assume that Plath murdered her father? And is the last stanza to be taken literally?

The point of the above readings is to show that no matter how close the identification between speaker and poet, the poem is a performance relying on a persona. This persona is fictional. It is not meant to be a literal or biographical depiction of the poet. Even when biographical signposts are available (as they are in varying degrees for all four poets, Wordsworth, Byron, Seth, and Plath), those markers tell us about the lyrical utterance or the poetic performance—i.e., about the poem, not the poet.

Let's bring this back to Shelley. The statue described in the sonnet is one of the two colossi that flanked the mortuary temple of the pharoah Rameses II, known to the ancient Greeks as Ozymandius, in the Theban necropolis. When Shelley's poem was written, one of the pair, known as the Younger Memnon, was en route to London after having been looted from its original location. (As the joke goes: "Why are the pyramids in Egypt? They were too big to ship to the British Museum.") The statue arrived in March 1818, two months after Shelley's sonnet was published. And since Shelley never went to Egypt, he could not have seen the statue or its pair in situ either.

He may have read Diodorus in the original Greek, or in translation, or as quoted by one of the travel writers Parr mentions. But the presence of this inscription in the poem demonstrates that Shelley's account is literary rather than literal—that the fragments that compose his statue are textual rather than lithic.

We know from Mary Shelley's journal that Smith had paid Percy and Mary Shelley a brief visit on 26–28th December. The proximity of this visit to the publication of both poems has led critics to speculate that the poems were written in friendly competition, where Smith and Shelley each tried their hand at a sonnet on the theme of Diodorus's description of the statue. It is known that Shelley's circle indulged in such competitions. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the sonnets on the Nile by Percy Shelley, Keats, and Hunt all resulted from similar challenges. The imminent arrival of the Younger Memnon in London was the spur for the Nile poems, and perhaps underwrites Smith's and Shelley's "Ozymandias" sonnets as well. All of this lends credence to the speculation that the latter sonnets were the result of a similar competition, and the speculation is often treated as fact. Here, for example, is John Rodenbeck:

The great sonnet was published on 11 January 1818. It had apparently been written barely two weeks earlier. The occasion of its composition is now well known. At his house near Marlowe [sic] on Saturday 27 December 1817, the day after Boxing Day, Shelley entertained Horace Smith (1779–1849), whom he had met at Leigh Hunt's the previous year. Smith was equally talented as a financier, a verse parodist, and an author of historical novels. The talk seems to have drifted around to Egyptian antiquity and to Diodorus Siculus ... and a friendly competition ensued in which each writer was to produce a sonnet on the subject of "Ozymandias, the King of Kings."

_{Rodenbeck, John. “Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley’s Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias’”. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 24, 2004, pp. 121–48. Accessed at JSTOR, 24 May 2024.}

It's worth noting, however, that neither Mary Shelley's journal nor Smith's lengthy account of his visit mentions any such competition. As Rodenbeck mentions, Smith was a gifted parodist, which suggests that he was able to come up with responses to existing poems quickly and skillfully. It's equally plausible that Smith read Shelley's sonnet and produced one on the same theme, as that both poems were composed simultaneously in a friendly match.

With no actual evidence that a competition was ever undertaken, it's pretty remarkable that critic after critic has presented the competition as established fact. This reveals, once again, the unreliability of using poems as evidence for incidents in the poet's life. Going from the two Ozymandias poems to any sort of biographical conclusion about the poets leads into hazard. And remarkably fruitless hazard, at that. The existence or non- of such a competition probably doesn't add to our understanding of Shelley's poem either way.

Contrariwise, what if we assume that the poem is autobiographical, that Shelley is faithfully reporting an actual conversation with someone returned from Egypt. Would we understand "Ozymandias" differently? Here too I'd venture probably not. Of the various possibilities we have been entertaining about the poem's composition, the theory that Shelley is imaginatively combining fragments from his reading comes closest to helping our understanding. If we could confidently identify Shelley's proximate sources for the poem, perhaps we could say whether the "traveler from an antique land" is Diodorus, or one of the other writers of Egyptian travelogues Shelley read.

As we've seen, we can't go from work to life and read Shelley's biography from "Ozymandias." That's begging the question: a fictional representation isn't reliable evidence for a factual claim. The reverse move is defensible, because we've seen that going from life to work while examining the lyric persona can be useful in some cases (Seth, for example). But "Ozymandias" is resistant to this approach. Based on what we do know about Shelley—namely, that he'd never been to Egypt and had never seen any statue of Rameses II—it's hard to read in this poem the light of his personal experiences. So here, a biographical reading seems like a dead-end.

A different approach would be to ask what the "I" is doing in the poem. Why does Shelley have that speaker at all? What would have happened if Shelley, like Seth, had eschewed the first person pronoun—if the poem were solely a description of the statue? Furthermore, the speaker tells us what someone else told him, not even something he saw first-hand. Why is the story told second-hand? What does this choice add: verisimilitude? Plausible deniability? Ironic distancing? Something else? Perhaps it's a sly acknowledgement of Shelley's lack of direct knowledge of Egypt?

A different approach would be to ask what the "I" is doing in the poem. Why does Shelley have that speaker at all? What would have happened if Shelley, like Seth, had eschewed the first person pronoun—if the poem were solely a description of the statue? Furthermore, the speaker tells us what someone else told him, not even something he saw first-hand. Why is the story told second-hand? What does this choice add: verisimilitude? Plausible deniability? Ironic distancing? Something else? Perhaps it's a sly acknowledgement of Shelley's lack of direct knowledge of Egypt? A reminder that Diodorus, too, is paraphrasing an earlier writer?

_{d'Orsay, Alfred. 1833 print of 1823 sketch of Lord Byron. Original in the British Museum. Accessed 23 May 2024.}

The specific circumstances of "Ozymandias"'s composition reinforce this view of the poem as a literary construct rather than literal fact. The poem first appeared in the 11 January 1818 edition of The Examiner, a weekly founded by Leigh Hunt. Shelley chose the pseudonym "Gilrastes." Three weeks later, another sonnet on the same subject written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith was printed in the 1 February issue. Accompanying Smith's sonnet was a note to the editor:

_{1833 print of 1823 sketch of Lord Byron by Alfred d'Orsay. Original in the British Museum. Accessed 23 May 2024.}

The poem first appeared in the 11 January 1818 edition of The Examiner, a weekly founded by Leigh Hunt. Shelley chose the pseudonym "Gilrastes." Three weeks later, another sonnet on the same subject written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith was printed in the 1 February issue. Accompanying Smith's sonnet was a note to the editor: