Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of Vision by V.A. De Luca (review)

HUMANITIES 427 his deep interest in a view of nature as a living process is at stake, he shows a striking power of critical detachment, especially in his acknowledgement of the significance of homogeneous colour in plants, which he alludes to as 'a very noticeable fact ... the strongest I have yet heard, in favour of the Newtonian Chromatology' (p 153). Levere's book is a valuable contribution to our understanding both of Coleridge and of science. In the perspective of this work Coleridge appears, not as a failing poet straying into dark metaphysical labyrinths, but as a well-equipped explorer of the field of knowledge - an explorer who refuses to divide the realm of intellect into separate provinces. The lesson Coleridge has to teach was once needed chiefly by scientists, who saw their work as more systematic and certain, and less adventurously intuitive, than it has turned out to be. Today, in the Age of Deconstruction and of free interpretation, it is more especially the student of literature who needs to turn to Coleridge, to be reminded of the unity of the world and man's common perception of it, and of the limits to the constitutive freedom of the individual imagination. It is one of the many merits of this work that it reveals a Coleridge who is more than a figure in intellectual history, and who speaks to present needs. (GEOFFREY DURRANT) V.A. De Luca. Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of Vision University of Toronto Press 1980. xv, 167. $17.50 Thomas De Quincey wrote voluminously but unevenly. His two great autobiographical works, the Confessions and Suspiria, succeed in recreating scenes of his childhood with great clarity and tenderness and then portray its loss in visionary and symbolic terms. His imaginative writing is at once personal, topical, and apocalyptic. His prose has more than once been called musical, both for its richly modulated rhythms and for the sustained development of complex imagistic and thematic motifs. These and De Quincey's complicated syntax equip him to explore the peripheries of consciousness in reverie, dream, hallucination, memory, and vision. It is ironic, then, that an autobiographer who so carefully analysed a Romantic imagination and an essayist who explicated literature , history, politics, and philosophy should so lack his own modern expositors. The problem is notoniy, as Ian Watt has said, that De Quincey falls between two literary periods. He has been victimized by the journalistic work he did for Blackwood's Magazine, which, along with the protean shapes of even his best writing, has lowered his reputation. Valery has said: 'Poets possess within themselves infinitely more answers than ordinary life has questions to put to them; and this provides them 428 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 with that perpetually latent, superabundant, and, as it were, irritable richness which at the slightest provocation brings forth treasures and even worlds.' De Quincey possessed that irritable richness, but his art could not always adequately contain his visionary worlds. V.A. De Luca's book is valuable, then, because it analyses and evaluates the scope of De Quincey's imagination. It assumes that, even though De Quincey is not a major writer, he wrote major works which share the Romantics' ability to integrate a complex sensibility into a psychic whole, to envision the world as a whole, and to relate inner and outer experience. One strength of the book is its patience in explicating individual works. Another is its willingness to interpret individual works in relation to the dominant themes 'which centre upon the situation of the solitary individual in a post-lapsarian state of lost community' (p 21), the myths of what De Luca calls the 'giant self: and the variety of De Quincey's imagery. De Luca is sensitive to the nuances of De Quincey's language and to both the paradoxes and epiphanies ofa visionary art that tries to replace broken pastoral dreams with an apocalyptic search for community. The book is a chronological explication of De Quincey's imaginative works as they reveal the structures of consciousness, and it stands up well with the best of the phenomenological analyses of Romantic modes of consciousness by contemporary Romantic critics. There are, however...