SOURCE: “De Quincey's Discovery of Lyrical Ballads: The Politics of Reading,” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 511-40.

In the following essay, Roberts examines De Quincey's reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry within the context of De Quincey's literary life and the development of his political views.

Thomas De Quincey's early reading of Lyrical Ballads has been widely hailed as the germinal event of his literary career. Biographers and critics have focused on De Quincey's astonishing recognition, at the age of fifteen, of Wordsworth as the predominant poetic figure of his age.¹ By the age of seventeen, De Quincey had declared to Wordsworth his unsurpassed admiration for “those two enchanting volumes” of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; and in 1834, over three decades on, he still regarded his discovery of Lyrical Ballads as “the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind.”² The testimony of...