A picture book edition of the classic, Ozymandias, was composed in 1817 by P.B. Shelley. "I met a traveler..." With these words the English poet Percy Shelley transported his readers to ancient Egypt. Ozymandias is the great pharoah Ramses II, whose statue Shelley imagined lying broken in the deset and whose name he chose as the title for his poem. In this unique interpretation of Ozymandias, Shelley and the traveler come to life in an extraordinary gallery of dreamlike illustrations. With an introduction by British poet Gerard Benson and notes for further reading, this book opens up to children a classic of Romantic poetry. Sculptor and illustrator Theo Gayer-Anderson lives in Egypt.
Author
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy. He was also admired by Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and Bertrand Russell. Famous for his association with his contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, he was also married to novelist Mary Shelley.
