Oddbean new post about login | logout @59034767 To the article: I think Smith is nowhere near Shelley’s level as a poet, but as you point out he did a better job of forcing the audience to draw the obvious parallel between Ramses and their present privileged position. Even though Shelley leaves that part unsaid, it seams reasonable that he expected his audience to be able to make that inference on their own.
@2c1f67da Absolutely — the same inference is there in Shelley’s poem, and one could argue that his poem is all the more powerful for leaving that unstated I’m still awfully charmed by the vista of that hunter, though. It probably comes from my being a sci-fi fan! The trope of “stumbling across ruins of a civilization and realizing it is *yours*” is a trope, to the point of being a cliché, and science fiction — as with, say, “Planet of the Apes” …