SOURCE: “The Art of Prose,” in De Quincey, Wordsworth and the Art of Prose, Macmillan Press, 1983, pp. 101-21.

In the following essay, Devlin examines De Quincey's claims regarding “the hidden capacities of prose” to express passion and “grandeur.”

‘To walk well, it is not enough that a man abstains from dancing.’

I

In the ‘General Preface’ of 1853 to James Hogg's Edinburgh edition of his collected works, De Quincey drew attention to the variety of his prose and to the originality of his prose-poems or impassioned prose. He made three divisions of what he had written; the largest section of his work was made up of what he called ‘essays’, which he defined as writings ‘which address themselves to the understanding as an insulated faculty’. Essays present a problem and try to solve it, and the only questions to be asked are ‘what is the success obtained?’ and (as...