ABSTRACT
Mont Blanc (1816) is a rich and difficult poem in which Shelley conjures out of the Alpine landscape 'a voice to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe' and investigates the interplay between the natural and the 'human mind's imaginings'. Frances Ferguson's essay playfully reads the poem in post-structuralist terms as concerned with the process of signification. In Mont Blanc Shelley falls in love with a ravine, a river, and a mountain not because of the nature of those objects but because of his own, his human, mind, which cannot imagine itself as a genuinely independent, isolated existence. Thus Mont Blanc creates an image of sublimity that continually hypostatizes an eternity of human consciousness. For the questions about epistemology that Earl Wasserman has very convincingly seen to dominate the poem appear very different if epistemology is correlated with ontology on the one hand or, alternatively, with love.
