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162ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Even this cold wet afternoon is irrelevant, I must admit, just a poor excuse for a chain of words . . . These lines summarize the matter. Perhaps in the long run it is unfortunate for Davis that his book was tapped by Yale. Perhaps, too, it is unfortunate that his book must bear the numerological weight of the mystic number seventy-five. Flaws that might pass muster in some less visible series — flaws typical of first books and understandable in young writers — are glaringly obvious here. The Yale Series, we always hope, will discover the best we have. Obviously enough, damned few books are out there that are ready to bear the burden of being so chosen. One Way to Reconstruct the Scene — stamped as it is by so much that is weak in so many contemporary poems beyond a certain level of competence — is not such a book. T.R. HUMMER, Oklahoma State University V.A. De Luca. Thomas De Quincy: The Prose of Vision. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. 167p. Thomas De Quincey occupies a unique but awkward position in English literary history. He is always recognized as an important writer whose vision is as characteristically romantic as that of any other figure associated with that mode of thinking, but he is never granted the major status reserved for the anthology poets and novelists of the nineteenth century. Many factors account for his relegation to this desert, including his choice of the mongrel form nonfictional prose as his chief medium of expression. Particularly difficult factors are the sheer volume and inconsistency of his canon: a reader must wade through literally thousands of pages of trivial and often incidental details to reach the essential statements of De Quincey's vision, and few scholars have found that task attractive or worthwhile. Studies of De Quincey have thus tended to be scattered and fragmentary, running from a discussion of his aesthetic (Proctor's Thomas De Quincey's Theory ofLiterature) through a narrative of his personal and literary relationship with Wordsworth (Jordan's De Quincey to Wordsworth) to an exhaustive source analysis (Goldman's The Mine and the Mint). A career study charting the development and fate of De Quincey's imaginative life has been long in coming. V.A. De Luca has at last provided such a study and has done so, for the most part, impressively: in examining the rise, triumph, and ultimate failure of De Quincey's imaginative world, his book should help in raising its subject into a deservedly more prominent position among the writers of the Romantic age. De Luca sees in De Quincey's writings "a kind of epic, fragmentary but powerful " (p. ix), one in which the writer struggles to achieve imaginativeharmony in the face of an external world he finds horrifying and chaotic: "... the primal subject matter . . . oscillates between expression of the naked threats of experience and postulations of various imaginative compensations that diminish these threats" (p. 8). The result is a vision poised between the stark horror of a world without God and a "dream-pastoral" (p.6), opium-aided and imaginatively inspired, where the contraries of ordinary experience are unified in a dimension about time. The "epic" that De Luca sees in De Quincey's writings involves the quest of the imaginative world 'or BOOK REVIEWS163 dominance (the same theme at the core of Wordsworth's Prelude), a quest that includes occasional victories but ultimate defeat. The recapturings of Eden surface haphazardly in De Quincey's early writings, chiefly in the "Pleasures of Opium" segment of the original (1822) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, where "De Quincey's imagination can freely integrate the world around him into a harmonious vision, drawing the heterogeneous into an encompassing pattern of the mind's acts and its possessions" (p. 21). The pleasures of opium invitably give way to the pains, and there is an equal sense of "personal incapacity to regain the lost community" (p. 24) in these works; for De Quincey, the demons can be kept away only so long. De Luca's is a comprehensive study in that it follows this imaginative struggle to its fullest consummation and then chronicles...

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