Ozymandias: The Secret History of the Internet’s Hottest Scandal
How a Beloved Poem Explains the Downfall of Everyone from Harvey Weinstein to Elizabeth Holmes to Carlos Watson
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Every Monday on The Nonlinear Life we talk about words to live by—popular sayings, mottos, buzzwords, proverbs, truisms, and aphorisms. Also, dad jokes! We call it Words4Life.
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It’s rare that a sexy, viral scandal on the front pages of the Internet evokes a famed 19th-century poem read in high school English classes around the world. But that’s exactly what happened this month. Add the two together and you get a perfect morality tale that is a stark reminder of why we read such poems to begin with.
Here's the full story, which I've not read anywhere:
The English banker and writer Horace Smith spent Christmas 1817 with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, the famed poet's former mistress whom he had recently wed. At the time, Shelley and his literary friends (Byron, Keats, and others) would challenge one another to writing competitions in a friendly game of one-upmanship. A similar game the following year produced the iconic novel Frankenstein, which 200 years later is the most assigned book on college campuses.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In the 1817 competition, Shelley and Smith both wrote poems inspired by a passage from a Greek historian about a mammoth Egyptian statue believed to be of Rameses II. Similar remains had recently been unearthed after Napoleon conquered Egypt. The statue of Rameses II, known among the friends by his Greek name, Ozymandias, is believed to have been the largest in Egypt. It contained the inscription: “If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.”
For his entry, Shelley wrote a sonnet, which was published in early January 1818. (You can listen to actor Bryan Cranston read the poem here). The haste could have been necessary because the Shelleys were desperate for money following the scandal of their union.
The full poem reads as follows:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The theme of Shelley’s poem is not subtle and is renown even to the high school students forced to write five-paragraph papers about it: Even the greatest leaders, the “kings of kings,” are impermanent, soon to become “lifeless” “frowns” with “shattered visages” and “sneers of cold,” their legacies melted until they’re “colossal wrecks,” boundless and bare,” “stretching far away” until “nothing beside remains.”
Ozymandias, in other words, is not a hero. He’s a chump. And a warning to history: Don’t take yourself too seriously. You, too, shall pass.
Which is the role the poem has played in pop culture, from Alien to Breaking Bad to Mad Men.
Walter White (Bryan Cranston) discovers all things must pass in Breaking Bad
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Be humble.
As the Stoics said, “Remember thou art mortal!” As the Buddhists say, “Whatever IS will be WAS.”
Which is why it’s all the more surprising that Carlos Watson, the charismatic 52-year-old, Harvard- and Stanford-educated, high-flying veteran of Goldman Sachs and MSNBC, as well as son and grandson of teachers, would choose to honor this poem in the name of the media company he co-founded in 2013. Ozy Media even defended their decision on their own website:
The poem is commonly read as a warning against outsized egos and the impermanence of power. But we choose to read it differently. To us, it's a call to think big while remaining humble. Admittedly, ours is an unconventional interpretation—because that's who we are. In a world littered with conformity, we like to see things differently.
Carlos Watson, head of Ozy Media
Well, as we all know now, the poem won. Ozy Media collapsed in the last few weeks in a manner all too familiar to high-flying untouchables (see: Harvey Weinstein, Lance Armstrong, Elizabeth Theranos, the Titanic, Cats). Ozy’s squandered $100 million in venture capital is perhaps a mere pittance to the untold millions spent by Ozymandias on his own grandiosity, but the lessons are all too familiar:
Don’t believe your own hype. Don’t try to outsmart the gods. And don’t be a smug know-it-all on your website and act like you’re smarter than your 9th grade English teacher.
If so, you’ll end up a colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands around you stretching far away.
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