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Thomas De Quincey (1785 1859) described his adolescent discovery of
the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge as 'an absolute
revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty'. The
admiring letter he sent to Wordsworth led to friendships with him,
Coleridge and Robert Southey. Relations soured over time, though,
as De Quincey's opium addiction and debts increased. Following
Coleridge's death in 1834, De Quincey began writing his 'Lake
Reminiscences', published serially in Tait's Magazine up to 1840.
Candid, occasionally bitter, and highlighting flaws such as
Coleridge's plagiarism, the recollections offended the surviving
poets and their families, yet these vivid portraits attract
continued scholarly interest for both the light shed on the
subjects and on the author himself. The collected essays, reissued
in this 1863 printing of the 1862 first edition, certainly served
to confirm the Lake Poets as leading figures of English
Romanticism."
'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of
a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife -
a purse - and a dark lane...' In this provocative and blackly funny
essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic
light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past
two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man
calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest
assured there is nothing in him'. Introducing Little Black
Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black
Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin
Classics, with books from around the world and across many
centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London
to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to
16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories
lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and
inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.
Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). Thomas de Quincey's Confessions and
an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings is available in Penguin
Classics.
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