Journal article
Passions read: "Ozymandias"
- Abstract:
- In Horace Smith’s nearly forgotten companion to Percy Shelley’s most famous sonnet, the broken sculpture voices its decree: “‘I am great Ozymandias,’ saith the stone.” Shelley’s poem, on the other hand, takes care to give us the king’s speech in writing: “on the pedestal, these words appear.” Shelley’s instinct for the difference between inscription and saying speaks to his own belief in poetry’s staying power. Two hundred years on, what remains of Shelley’s poetry besides words on a page? The extent to which words, and the pages on which they appear, mattered to Shelley constitutes the broad subject of this essay, which also permits itself to dwell in a few unanswerable questions about where poetry resides—the throat, the letter, or somewhere else entirely. Interrogating “Ozymandias” for its enthusiasm as well as its skepticism regarding print, the essay wishes to raise the following question: how does Shelley’s attitude towards poetry’s remains—its “everlasting” power—prefigure our own contemporary debates regarding the permanence and impermanence of poetic texts in a digital age?
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/10509585.2022.2114212
Authors
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
- Journal:
- European Romantic Review More from this journal
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 5
- Pages:
- 683-696
- Publication date:
- 2022-09-19
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-02-15
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1740-4657
- ISSN:
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1050-9585
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1242413
- Local pid:
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pubs:1242413
- Deposit date:
-
2022-03-04
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Erica McAlpine
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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