SOURCE: “The Giant Self: Suspiria de Profundis” in Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of Vision, University of Toronto Press, 1980, pp. 57-83.

In the following essay, De Luca discusses the sequel to Confessions of an Opium-Eater as a blending of autobiography and myth.

There is little precedent in other major Romantic writers for the strangely late onset of De Quincey's chief phase as an imaginative artist, a phase that begins with the Suspiria de Profundis of his sixtieth year and continues for a dozen years more. A last and climactic bout with the powers of opium, a struggle always fecund to his imagination, partially explains this phenomenon.¹ But whatever the external circumstances, this mid-winter spring of De Quincey's career is peculiarly appropriate, for a pattern of tentative beginnings and late flowering is intrinsic to all of his best work. Such a pattern is visible in the Confessions, for example...