...de Man whispering "metaphor is error" (Allegories of Reading 151) at every stage of Peterfreund's argument. And yet Peterfreund persists in talking about what he calls "the inspired and inspiring language of poetry" (231). In Shelley Among Others, he undertakes vigorous and theoretically-informed rehabilitation of metaphor, at the same time as he traces Shelley's negotiations between skepticism and faith through scrupulous close reading of his poems. The question of whether Shelley's poetic faith was misplaced is not answered until de Man finally materializes in a quotation on the last page of the book. Only then can the reader be sure that Shelley's idea of language is not being subjected to a hermeneutic of suspicion, but is being advocated here in defense of poetry.

To Shelley, language itself was luxuriantly metaphorical. Drawing on Kristeva and Lacan, Peterfreund links metaphor and desire ("metaphor is the figure of love expressed" he writes on page 30), but does not regard that as a disability. Rhetoric, he seems to say, is an ineluctable feature of language; it is our habitual and unreflective...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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