Shelley and Smith's Ozymandias Compare/contrast

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972) claims, "When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we 'saw' the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history." Berger proposes that sharing ones experiences is dependent on that individual's perspective. Two poets that are able to demonstrate how perspectives may differ after experience the same event are Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith, who in 1817 competed against each other to see who could write the best sonnet about Ozymandias, a partially destroyed monument of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II. During the course of this competition, Shelley penned "Ozymandias" and Smith penned "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing By Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below." Both poems were published by Leigh Hunt in The Examiner; Shelley's on January 11, 1818 and Smith's on February 1,...
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