Thomas De Quincey, (born Aug. 15, 1785, Manchester, Lancashire, Eng.—died Dec. 8, 1859, Edinburgh, Scot.), English essayist and critic. While a student at Oxford he first took opium to relieve the pain of facial neuralgia. He became a lifelong addict, an experience that inspired his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), whose highly poetic and imaginative prose has made it an enduring masterpiece of English style. As a critic he is best known for the essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823).
Thomas De Quincey summary
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opium Summary
Opium, narcotic drug that is obtained from the unripe seedpods of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), a plant of the family Papaveraceae. (See poppy.) Opium is obtained by slightly incising the seed capsules of the poppy after the plant’s flower petals have fallen. The slit seedpods exude a milky
essay Summary
Essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Some early treatises—such as those of Cicero on the
literary criticism Summary
Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often
