Today I learned that the 1818 sonnet Ozymandias, most famous for its excerpt “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains”, is actually one of two sonnets titled Ozymandias published in British intellectual journal The Examiner in 1818. Its author, Percy Shelley, wrote it as part of an informal contest with his friend Horace Smith to write a poem on that topic. Wikipedia has the text of Smith’s losing and infinitely less famous sonnet at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith).

I also learned that Percy Shelley was married to Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in that same year, 1818. One of her inspirations, and possibly Percy’s, was spending the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva with renowned poet Lord Byron (Ada Lovelace’s father). 1816 is noteworthy for being the infamous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer.

In 1815, Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora erupted in the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history (in other words, the past ten thousand years). Volcanic ash lingered in the atmosphere for years, leading to strikingly colored skies around the world in 1816 (often immortalized in Romantic paintings), massive crop failures, and a subsequent winter called Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, where the temperature in New York reached -34C (-30F).