![]() ![]() Shelley is one of your bad boy poet celebrities of the early nineteenth century. If Love’s Philosophy is my favourite love poem, Ozymandias is my favourite ‘everything’ poem. I think you could write books about this poem. This is THE poem where all the words, the breaks, the punctuation, the form, the structure, everything is worth commenting on. I categorised Ozymandias as ‘dense but divine’ on my post about Love’s Philosophywhich is exactly what it is. Why bother, if you can boil it down to something so pithy that you can put it on a postcard and yet capture what it means to be human within those brief lines. Not only does it make a powerful and profound statement about humanity, but it does so in 14 lines. It’s about life, success, power and everything in between. To me, it’s a commentary on everything that there is to say about power. ![]() I don’t just love it because it’s neat though. Why do I love it so much, you ask? It’s just a poem after all.Īh, yes, it’s just a poem. For my favourite of all poems, it deserves that much indeed. Here, I’ll look at form, voice and context, then structure and language in the next. This post is going to be split into two, since it’s an epic poem to cover. I think it’s time to put a stop to the insanity of explaining that it’s a sonnet because powerful men are in love with themselves or that it was a poem about a statue imported in 1818 (that’s you, Wikipedia, you unreliable thing, you!). It’s going to be a looooong post because I love this poem and also because there is such a lot of rubbish already circulating about it. I have to say that there’s some good poems in here – including my very favourite of all, Ozymandias, the one I’m starting with. It’s been a long summer of marking and a bit of a hiatus between the series of blog posts on Love and Relationships for the AQA GCSE English Literature Anthology, and this next series on Power and Conflict.
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