Ozymandias And Elitism

Is pleasure evidence of unworthiness?

I was reading this Reddit thread about the famous set of two Ozymandias poems (written as a challenge!). The one considered superior and better known is by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The other one was by Horace Smith.

At some point in school I read the two versions, and to my ear the Smith one was more pleasant to read, and more plain in its meaning, while the Shelley one was a bit more mysterious and sophisticated. I always chafed at the idea of hidden meanings or critical analysis. I guess I’m kind of a “tell me what you mean” person, so I preferred, personally, the version that made the point explicitly, which Smith does at the end in comparing Ozymandias to a future destroyed London:

We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

It’s very telling-not-showing, whereas the Shelley version talks about nothing but the statue in the desert, and leaves the reader to infer the point that every great civilization will one day be a “colossal wreck.” Its final line—“the lone and level sands stretch far away”—is the only part of it that I actually remember without reading it again, and it’s very literal but also very evocative.

Anyway, the thread is asking about why the Shelley version is generally considered superior, and the answer is Smith’s is a singsongy, “here’s what this poem is about!” exercise, where the Shelley requires the reader to actually do some understanding, and is also just a better piece of writing. Basically.

I find that interesting because it raises the question of whether “better” always means “less pleasant.” Why does it make you unsophisticated if you like the simpler rhyming and rhythm of the Smith poem? Or if its in-text explanation resonates with you? Are you supposed to feel guilty over that? What exactly does it mean to say that one is better than the other?

Is there something metaphysical there, or something about human nature? I wondered once, is there any culture or cuisine in which children aren’t routinely told a variation of “eat your vegetables”? In other words, are we just hardwired to find the inferior choice subjectively superior? Is reality simply ordered such that most things that feel good are bad for us?

When JFK announced the space program, he didn’t merely observe that landing a man on the moon was a difficult technical challenge, which of course it was. He said that we were doing it because it was hard. Is that really sound reasoning?