Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias is published pseudonymously…
January 1818 CE
The sonnet is today regarded as one of Shelley's more famous works and is frequently anthologized.
Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith (1779–1849), who also wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the same title.
Smith's poem will be published in The Examiner a few weeks after Shelley's sonnet.
Both poems explore the fate of history and the ravages of time: even the greatest men and the empires they forge are impermanent, their legacies fated to decay into oblivion.