Within the terms of canonical romanticism, Thomas De Quincey is generally seen as a disciple of Wordsworth, although the closer parallels that his career affords to Coleridge's have often been remarked. Focal to many of the shared concerns between Coleridge and De Quincey was certainly a strenuous promotion of Wordsworth as the greatest national poet of their age and the embodiment of ‘imagination’ or literary ‘power’ (in the key terms of their co-extensive critical discourse). Almost as a foil to Wordsworth's literary and personal success, both Coleridge and De Quincey constantly drew attention to their own ruined potential, the function of opium addiction, of financial embarrassment, of oppression from metaphysical researches, of dependency on German sources and a host of other contributory factors. The ensuing view of De Quincey and Coleridge as secondary or ‘parasitical’ writers in relation to the primacy of Wordsworth may be seen however—in the terms of Jerome McGann's cautionary injunction, now familiar to students of romanticism—as a form of ‘romantic ideology’, an influential self-representation that requires to be interrogated. De Quincey's confession of the ‘deep deep magnet’ by which he was drawn to Wordsworth, and his letter of youthful adoration to the poet, have contributed to the interpretative emphasis which highlights Wordsworth as De Quincey's chief literary forebear and Coleridge as a subsidiary figure in their triangular relationship. My study attempts to contest this hierarchical model of influence (which I believe persists despite some recent critical challenges) whereby Wordsworth is axiomatically regarded as the primary influence on Coleridge and De Quincey. This is not to deny Wordsworth as a complicating and essential aspect in the relationship between Coleridge and De Quincey, but only that this relationship needs to be studied without a prior acceptance of what may be termed the ideology of Wordsworthian dominance.

A word is necessary on the theoretical implications of ‘influence’ in a literary study such as I am now attempting. Literary studies of influence have been strongly modelled in recent criticism by Harold Bloom whose seminal works such as The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading have helped criticism to move away from a literalist idea of influence (as a matter of direct acceptance of authority) towards a subtler conception of the ‘anxious’ nature of poetic influence.