"Ozymandias" is a notable poem by which author?

"Ozymandias" is the title of two related sonnets published in 1818.

The first was written by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner in London. It was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems (1819) and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826. "Ozymandias" is Shelley's most famous work and is frequently anthologised.

In antiquity, Ozymandias (Ὀσυμανδύας) was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum's acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the 13th century BCE, leading some scholars to believe that Shelley was inspired by this. The 7.25-short-ton (6.58 t; 6,580 kg) fragment of the statue's head and torso had been removed in 1816 from the mortuary temple of Ramesses (the Ramesseum) at Thebes by Italian adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni. It was expected to arrive in London in 1818, but did not arrive until 1821.