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Poetic Comparison of Shelley and Cummings
When reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" it is hard not to think of the former leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, because of the setting of the poem in a sandy wilderness. The short poem depicts a once-great tyrant with a sneering, cold and arrogant face whose regime and statue, around which he centered his cult of personality, has now crumbled into dust. The only difference between the statue of the poem and the propaganda pictures of Hussein is that the statue of the poem seems to be well crafted by the artist, as if the artist was expressing his or her true feelings about the ruler in a subtle fashion. The statue has a "frown/and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command" that "tell that its sculptor well those passions read/Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things" This seems to indicate that Ozymandias did support some good artists, although only artists that glorified him.
If "Ozymandias" seems to embody a Middle Eastern form of kingly worship, then "Buffalo Bill's Defunct" by e.e. cummings seems to embody an American ideal, that of the wild cowboy who admits no compassion and no law into his code of ethics, a showman who rides a: "watersmooth-silver / stallion/and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat / Jesus." The creator of the "Wild West Show" that made spectacles of violence attractive and engaged in shameless self-promotion can perhaps be best embodied in a figure like Arnold Schwarzenegger, an action movie hero that took his celebrity to new levels, entering politics and making violence seem cartoon-like, fun and almost wholesome and American. As an American archetype of entertainment and culture, despite the title of cumming's poem, Buffalo Bill is anything but "defunct." Although the cowboy is no longer as glorified as it was in American society during Buffalo Bill's day, the affection for lawless, violent men who possess charm and showmanship lives on.
Works Cited cummings, e.e. "Buffalo Bill's Defunct." 19 Mar 2008. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/buffalo-bill/
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias." 19 Mar 2008. http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/672
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