The editor's perspective here is spot on: these works serve as two monuments to human arrogance. Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818) is the more renowned piece, a sonnet centered on a fallen king whose bragging has turned into a punchline. Stevens's jar (1919), on the other hand, is quieter and more peculiar—a plain object that neither does anything nor grows anything, yet somehow manages to reshape all of Tennessee around it. One poem reflects on the failure of human ambition in hindsight, while the other captures the unsettling success of human presence as it unfolds.
The common thread linking them: both poems utilize a single artifact to reveal the hubris embedded in the human desire to mark, organize, and outlast the natural world.
The Reader's Atlas · Compare
Anecdote of the JarOzymandias
Put "Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens alongside "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and you’ll notice a similar oddity: a human-made object placed in a landscape that seems to overlook it, prompting the poem to explore the meaning of that object.
Poets
Wallace Stevens / Percy Bysshe Shelley
Years
1919
§01 The thesis
Anecdote of the Jar & Ozymandias
A reader's case for putting these two side by side — what each carries, and what they argue when they sit on the same page.
§02 The dialectic axes
The two poems on four axes
Each axis isolates one specific vector — speaker, form, image, closing move — and reads the two poems against each other on that single dimension.
Axis
Poem A
Anecdote of the Jar
Wallace Stevens
Poem B
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
01Speaker
Poem A · Anecdote of the Jar
In "Anecdote of the Jar," Stevens introduces a first-person speaker who states, "I placed a jar in Tennessee." This speaker is responsible for the poem's main action, which means he bears the consequences of that action. The poem doesn’t clarify why he placed the jar, and this ambiguity is significant — the act feels casual, somewhat nonchalant, while the control that emerges is far greater than the simple gesture itself.
Poem B · Ozymandias
In "Ozymandias," the speaker relays a story from a traveler about a statue spotted in a desert, positioning himself as a listener rather than an actor. This two-step narration — the speaker hears from the traveler who witnessed the ruins — allows the speaker to maintain moral distance. He observes hubris without being part of it, and this separation lends the poem a fable-like authority.
02Form
Poem A · Anecdote of the Jar
Stevens wrote "Anecdote of the Jar" in three stanzas of four lines each, using a loose slant-rhyme scheme that never fully resolves. The straightforward form feels almost like a nursery rhyme — "And round it was, upon a hill" — which adds to the oddity of the poem's philosophical depth. The neatness of the stanzas reflects the order that the jar brings to the wilderness.
Poem B · Ozymandias
Shelley crafted "Ozymandias" as a sonnet, but he disrupts the usual rhyme scheme, preventing it from fitting neatly into the traditional Petrarchan or Shakespearean forms. This choice reflects the poem's message: a structure typically linked to stability and endurance is subtly unraveling, mirroring the fate of the statue it portrays.
03Central Image
Poem A · Anecdote of the Jar
The jar in Stevens's poem is intentionally plain — round, gray, and unadorned, it rests on a hill. There's no inscription, no splendor, and no backstory. Its strength lies solely in its location and its choice to remain aloof from the surrounding natural world. "It did not give of bird or bush" stands out as the poem's most chilling line: the jar creates nothing, yet it brings order to everything.
Poem B · Ozymandias
Shelley's main image features a broken colossus: "two vast and trunkless legs of stone" alongside a "shattered visage" partially buried in sand. The statue is massive, emotive, and damaged. Once, its power was evident through its size and the words inscribed on it; now, that power is only felt as a void. This image has a dramatic quality, contrasting with the starkness of Stevens's jar.
04Closing Move
Poem A · Anecdote of the Jar
Stevens concludes "Anecdote of the Jar" with a sense of alienation: the jar is described as "Like nothing else in Tennessee." While the wilderness has adapted to it, the jar doesn't fit into either nature or culture — it stands apart. This final line doesn’t provide a resolution to the tension created throughout the poem; instead, it highlights the jar’s oddity and leaves it there.
Poem B · Ozymandias
Shelley concludes "Ozymandias" with one of the most iconic images in English poetry: "the lone and level sands stretch far away." Following the king's arrogance and the traveler's tale, the poem leads us into a vast emptiness. This final line emphasizes sheer visual scale — the desert triumphs through its indifference, rather than through any act of resistance.
§03 Synthesis & departure
The shared ground and the divergence
Shared
The most apparent commonality lies in structure: each poem places a man-made object in a wild or desolate setting and observes the outcome. In Shelley’s poem, a desert engulfs a king's statue; in Stevens’s, a jar reshapes a Tennessee wilderness. Both poets use the object to explore human ambition rather than merely depict a location.
Irony serves as the main driving force in both poems. Shelley's irony is overt—Ozymandias urges the powerful to despair, only to find that despair belongs to him. Meanwhile, Stevens's irony is subtler yet equally incisive—the jar "took dominion everywhere" while being "gray and bare," contributing nothing to the landscape it controls.
In terms of form, both poems utilize straightforward, declarative sentences that build impact through repetition. Phrases like "Nothing beside remains" and "It took dominion everywhere" resonate strongly for the same reason: concise subject-verb structures nestled within more descriptive lines. Additionally, both poets employ the term "bare"—Shelley's "boundless and bare" sands and Stevens's jar that is "gray and bare"—highlighting a significant overlap in their vocabulary of emptiness.
Where they diverge
The most significant difference lies in time. Shelley's poem takes place after the events have unfolded—the statue is already a ruin, and the empire has vanished. The lesson about pride has been imparted by time itself. In contrast, Stevens's poem unfolds in the present tense: "I placed a jar." The control is happening right now, and there’s no comforting image of ruins at the end. The jar triumphs. That’s the unsettling distinction.
The speakers also have very different connections to the object. In Shelley's poem, the speaker is distanced—he learned about it from a traveler who witnessed the statue. This separation softens the impact and gives the poem a fable-like quality. On the other hand, Stevens's speaker is the one who placed the jar. He bears full responsibility for the jar's effect on the wilderness, and the poem offers him no chance for redemption.
Lastly, Shelley's artifact has a voice—the pedestal bears Ozymandias's boast, a human expression preserved in stone. Stevens's jar, however, remains completely silent. It wields power without intention or proclamation, which, in some ways, makes it the more unsettling object of the two.
§04 A reader's order of operations
Which to read first
If you found your way to this page through "Ozymandias," I recommend reading "Anecdote of the Jar" next. It strips away all the comforts that Shelley provides. While Shelley relies on time to humble human pride, Stevens takes a different approach. The jar triumphs immediately, in the here and now, and there are no consequences for that. There's no fallen king, no ironic message, and no lesson to be learned. If "Ozymandias" convinced you that nature always has the final say, "Anecdote of the Jar" will leave you questioning that belief — and that's precisely what makes it a worthwhile read.
§05 Reader's questions
On Anecdote of the Jar vs Ozymandias, frequently asked
Answer
Sure! Here’s the humanized version of your text:
Yes, especially in courses that explore how art, nature, and power intersect. This combination often appears in American literature surveys featuring Stevens and in comparative poetry classes for high school and college students.
Answer
Shelley's "Ozymandias" first appeared in *The Examiner* in January 1818. Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" was published in 1919, more than a hundred years later. It's likely that Stevens was familiar with Shelley's poem, but he never explicitly addressed their relationship.
Answer
From "Ozymandias," the line that often stands out is "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" — the king's boast that has come to symbolize doomed arrogance. In "Anecdote of the Jar," the most frequently referenced line is "It took dominion everywhere," succinctly expressing the poem's central unease in just four words.
Answer
Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramesses II, a powerful pharaoh from ancient Egypt. Shelley wrote the poem in part because the British Museum had recently acquired a fragment of a giant statue of Ramesses, which was widely discussed in London at the time.
Answer
Critics have interpreted it in various ways: as art, as a reflection of civilization, as the human mind shaping chaos, and even as just a simple jar without any deeper meaning. Stevens intentionally kept his intentions vague. The poem is effective because the jar is both completely ordinary and oddly powerful — forcing it into one interpretation often diminishes its impact.
Answer
Neither cleanly. Shelley sticks to fourteen lines and iambic pentameter, but his rhyme scheme (ABABACDCEDEFEF) doesn't fit the usual patterns. Most scholars describe it as a hybrid or irregular sonnet, and many interpret this formal instability as a deliberate choice — the structure mirrors the crumbling nature of the statue.
Answer
The poem doesn't offer any commentary, which adds to its unsettling quality. The jar's control is presented as a fact, without judgment. It's up to the reader to decide if that control is a success or a breach, and serious critics have debated both perspectives.