In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

On De Quincey's Theory of Literary Power IJohn W. Bilsland De Quincey's various statements on literature of power are in many respects inconsistent, and in dealing with them one must guard against the ever present danger of finding a coherence to which they cannot rightly lay claim. Over the years from 1823 to 1848 his conception of the experience of power obviously underwent marked shifts: the essentially emotional experience described in the Leiters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected (1823) had assumed a decidedly ethical cast by the time De Quincey turned to it in the essay on The Poetry of Pope (1848). One can, however, despite such shifts, make certain tenable generalizations with regard to De Quincey's several statements, and when doing so one is struck by the fact that all depend upon the fundamental idea that in a fuJI appreciation of a work of literature of power a reader surrenders himself-as does the mystic-to a total absorption in an immediate experience. He knows pleasurably a great stimulation of his being: emotions which ordinary life seldom calls up are both roused and organized. In the period of stimulation, too, he becomes peculiarly aware of the infinite capacities of his own spirit, capacities not ouly of feeling, but also of vision: he sees embodied in the work of literatnre ideals and truths which he has never before known. And from the revelation which he now has of life he emerges a purified, morally better and spiritually richer, human being: he not ouly sees the world about him with cleared eyes, responding to it with heightened sensibilities, but he also moves now with a mystical faith in values living ever beyond the bounds of ordinary life. In arriving at this conception of power as the end of the literary activity, De Quincey of course worked from his own experiences of literatnre. When he wrote the Leiters to a Young Man-in which one finds the first statement on power-he was a mature man of thirty- 470 JOHN W. BILSLAND seven, and his analysis there of the literary experience retIected years of wide and intensive reading. But long before he had done much of that reading, and certainly long before he ever considered expounding a theory of power, De Quincey had known what it was to feel one's entire being absorbed in a single emotional experience from which one emerged a profoundly changed person. When, in the Leiters to a Young Man, he asks, "when I am ... suddenly startled into a feeling of the infinity of the world within me, is this power, or what may I call it?'" he raises a question which he might well have asked of any of the great moments of his childhood and youth. The death of his sister Elizabeth, the Cherubini canon sung at his guardian'S, his last evening at the Manchester Grammar School, Ann's sacrifice of her few precious coins to buy him wine, his first reading of the Lyrical Ballads, his first use of opium-aU these were for De Quincey great "spots of time," moments of profound emotional and spiritual experience which were to remain with him throughout his life, moulding his thought, colouring his attitude. In her very fine little essay on De Quincey in The Common Reader Virginia Woolf rightly points out that although De Quincey had grave faults as an autobiographer-diffuseness, redundancy, aloofness, dreaminess , even prudery-he was still "capable of being transfixed by the mysterious solemnity of certain emotions; of realising how one moment may transcend in value fifty years...."2 And it is in his experience of these great moments of his early life that one can find the basis of De Quincey's theory that true literature has as its function the rousing of an experience of power in the reader. As much as any critic, and more than most, De Quincey was to relate his comments and judgments on literature to life itself, substantiating them by reference to his own actual experience. Time and time again-as in the passage on Cassandra's prophetic horror in the Agamemnon, the analysis of the...

pdf

Share