De Quincey and Wordsworth — II

Abstract

De Quincey is a disappointing critic of Wordsworth, and his comments on particular poems are few and often thin. It has been calculated that over two hundred allusions to Wordsworth are scattered through his collected works, but they are seldom expanded into comments on Wordsworth’s poetic practice or into specific criticisms of his poetry.¹ De Quincey seldom made detailed remarks on the language of any poets (except Milton) and rarely studied poems or even passages from poems. There is praise for Keats’s ‘Hyperion’, but no lines from it are discussed or even quoted; a sympathetic portrait of Shelley contains some quotation but little comment; and in De Quincey’s most famous and original critical essay, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, he quotes only one line from the play. Sometimes, indeed, it is possible to wonder how good a critic of poetry De Quincey is, and to throw back at him the accusation he aimed at Wordsworth of a one-sidedness which showed itself in Wordsworth’s likings (De Quincey blamed him for praising Cotton extravagantly) but even more in his dislikings; De Quincey was ‘appalled’ at Wordsworth’s contempt for the ‘not sufficiently appreciated’ verse tales of Harriet Lee.

‘… no precedents in any literature.’