“Re-Collecting De Quincey” – A Review-essay of The Works of Thomas De Quincey. Gen. ed. Grevel Lindop. 21 Volumes. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003. ISBN 1-85196-054-6 (for the complete set). Price: £1650/US$2775.

Like that of many students until fairly recently, my undergraduate exposure to Romanticism came almost exclusively via the poetry of The Big Six. Well, The Big Five, because Byron seemed too ironic about the autonomy of the Romantic imagination, that time’s prevalent critical myth. University course curricula for the study of Romantic literature enshrined this approach, insisted upon it, although the professor for my Romantics course took a profoundly (and thankfully) darker view of the imagination’s metaphysical longings. We were allowed, as Persuasion’s Anne Elliot says to Captain Benwick, whose grief is exacerbated by his obsession for reading Byron, an adequate dose of prose. Whereas Austen’s heroine urges reading prose as a healthy antidote to poetic excess and idolatry, however, we needed prose in order to appreciate generic hierarchies, that is, to distinguish it from Romantic poetry’s higher calling. We studied non-fiction prose such as Shelley’s Defence or Wordsworth’s Preface, because it helped us to discern the best that had been known and thought in Romantic verse. But fiction itself seemed a necessary evil that, indulged too much, might deter us from this task. We read Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, all as anomalous of the Romantic imagination’s metaphysical qualities. That two of these were by “women writers” preempted their importance in advance, one for too obviously domesticating the imagination, the other for demonizing it as a monstrosity of human nature. The third’s accomplishment was no better because it confessed a “feminizing” constitutional weakness and decline in the face of imaginative power. Even more than Byron’s, even more than the pale achievements of “women’s work,” De Quincey’s writing was marginal. Since at that time we rarely addressed poetry historically or culturally, never challenged its canonical eminence, or the canon itself, I had no way of understanding this marginality’s critical resonance. Apart from certain cases (Vincent De Luca’s The Prose of Vision, for one), an earlier organicist criticism had no place for De Quincey, except insofar as Confessions was the synecdoche of a larger unfinished Wordsworthian accomplishment or could be exoticized as the Coleridgean afflatus of a (sometimes dangerous) Romantic inspiration (as suggested by the work of Alethea Hayter or M. H. Abrams). Because his most notable work was the public confession of an addiction never successfully overcome, De Quincey exemplified a kind of unusuable negativity within the greater economy of Romantic thought. No matter that Wordsworth classified his writings using the metaphor of a gothic church in ruins, with “sepulchral recesses” whose darkness threatens entirely to undermine even what remains of the edifice; or that Coleridge’s addiction aborted the occult and dejected body of his poetry for the more transcendental philosophicalness of his prose, the terminable hegemony of which is so easily threatened by the interminable counterforces of his notebooks and marginalia. Wordsworth and Coleridge evoked the desire for reparation, and they were accordingly useful to a later (post-)Victorian context because their work was culturally therapeutic. De Quincey’s was not, and it did not help that in the 1830s, a crucial time in the reevaluation of Romanticism’s legacy for a Victorian audience, he embarked upon a sardonic psychoanalysis of the Lake School, particularly of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in a series of papers for Tait’s Magazine. These did little to memorialize the spirit of the age. But perhaps the author had by 1821 already sealed his own posthumous fate by asking us in Confessions to imagine himself poised, undecidedly, indeterminately, between a bottle of laudanum and a book of German metaphysics, both foreign intrusions into the safe space of …