De Quincey's relationship with Coleridge has often been viewed in the critical tradition as a secondary aspect of his relationship to Wordsworth. A fairly typical reaffirmation of this tradition of biographical interpretation may be taken from a recent article on De Quincey's relation to the ‘Wordsworth-Coleridge ethos’:

Here Coleridge is admittedly De Quincey's ‘more natural forerunner’ but the critic's acceptance of an inevitable Wordsworthian priority overrules this judgement so that it ultimately follows for him that ‘it was in Wordsworth's transmutations of Coleridge's ideas, however, that De Quincey's most acute focus of interest lay’. Yet such a submission of Coleridgean thought to a Wordsworthian critical dispensation would seem forced in the light of Coleridge's famed intellectual propensity and of his wellknown controversy with Wordsworth on the fundamental critical principles enunciated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. As De Quincey commented in his essay, ‘On Wordsworth's Poetry’, it was a remarkable illustration of the ‘vapoury character of all that philosophy which Coleridge and Wordsworth professed to hold in common, that, after twenty years of close ostensible agreement, it turned out, when accident led them to a printed utterance of their several views, that not one vestige of true and virtual harmony existed to unite them’ (M, XI, p. 324). Moreover, De Quincey, who paid homage to Coleridge as ‘the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgement, that has yet existed amongst men’ and who ‘searched east and west, north and south, for all known works or fragments’ (W, pp. 33, 34) of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, was not likely to underestimate the critical challenge posed by Coleridge to Wordsworth.