![]() ![]() Drucker supposes that “the nostalgic attachment to the idea of an ‘origin’ of poetry in song makes us give more significance to sound values over visual ones,” but she goes on to point out how in most cases, the sounds of poetry could not exist without the visual texts to convey it: “If I erase the letters no ‘sound’ remains” (238–39). Footnote 2 Visual lines keep in ways that heard ones do not, even if the physical manner in which texts are kept is always evolving (early texts were recorded on papyri then they were stored in books in libraries latterly, on servers in bytes). Some classical scholars even propose that the ancient Greeks developed their alphabet expressly to preserve Homer’s poetry. ![]() ![]() The lastingness of physical texts, compared to the ephemerality of sounds or mental pictures, is surely one reason why poems tend to be written down. Footnote 1 How much was Shelley thinking about the preservation of his own lines and meanings as he imagined the history of a king’s ill-fated boast? And what general lessons about poetry’s physical staying power does he engrave in the inscription he places at the heart of “Ozymandias”? Surely “the decay / Of that colossal Wreck” not only announces a whole civilization’s destruction but also hints at the poet’s consideration of his own legacy (12–13). Several of the problems Shelley addresses in his sonnet about a broken statue-how time erodes power, how things do not last-are figured in the verbal and visual materiality of the text itself. This essay, as it sidles up to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” concerns itself with the value of that poem’s visual element: its presence on the page. Notwithstanding the ancient, oral tradition, our ability to see a poem (in some form of print) remains integral to our reception of it, no matter how emphatic or pleasing its sounds are. And, as Johanna Drucker has noted with regard to poetry’s graphical qualities and codes, “the transmission history of poetry depends upon visual forms” (237). ![]() As readers, we most often encounter them visually: in books or on screens. Yet poems, in their presentation, are subject to the realities of space and time. Where do poems live-the ear, the page, or the mind? Questions like this reflect poetry’s phenomenological variety. 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? 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. 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. ![]()
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