Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Textual Note and Abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 ‘A Man Darkly Wonderful’: Coleridgean Reorientations in De Quincey Criticism
- 2 ‘Like the Ghost in Hamlet’: Radical Politics and Revisionary Interpretation
- 3 Revolutionary Joy: De Quincey's Discovery of Lyrical Ballads
- 4 The Pains of Growth: Language and Cultural Politics
- 5 Power and Knowledge: English Nationalism and the Mediation of Kant in England
- 6 De Quincey as Critic: Politics of Style and Representation of Wordsworth
- Conclusion—Visions and Revisions: New Directions in De Quincey Studies
- A Three Uncollected Coleridgean Marginalia from De Quincey
- B ‘Lessons of the French Revolution’
- C ‘To William Tait, Esquire’
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - ‘A Man Darkly Wonderful’: Coleridgean Reorientations in De Quincey Criticism
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Textual Note and Abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 ‘A Man Darkly Wonderful’: Coleridgean Reorientations in De Quincey Criticism
- 2 ‘Like the Ghost in Hamlet’: Radical Politics and Revisionary Interpretation
- 3 Revolutionary Joy: De Quincey's Discovery of Lyrical Ballads
- 4 The Pains of Growth: Language and Cultural Politics
- 5 Power and Knowledge: English Nationalism and the Mediation of Kant in England
- 6 De Quincey as Critic: Politics of Style and Representation of Wordsworth
- Conclusion—Visions and Revisions: New Directions in De Quincey Studies
- A Three Uncollected Coleridgean Marginalia from De Quincey
- B ‘Lessons of the French Revolution’
- C ‘To William Tait, Esquire’
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
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’:
Coleridge, with his interest in dreams, fantasies, and ‘facts of mind’, was his more natural forerunner, but when De Quincey ran away from Manchester Grammar School in 1802, his first urge was to go to Grasmere; and when, having resisted it, he wrote to Wordsworth a year later, his feeling for Coleridge emerged only in the conclusion to his letter, where he said that he would not have written in such terms to any man on earth ‘except yourself and one other (a friend of your's)’.
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.
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- Revisionary GleamDe Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument, pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000