ABSTRACT
Published in PW II, pp. 201–7. The ‘criticisms’ which De Quincey here discusses are mainly those made by Coleridge in Chapter 22 of Biographia Literaria, where he analyses ‘the characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry’ and asks
Is there one word for instance, attributed to the pedlar in the EXCURSION, characteristic of a pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and benevolent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? (BL II, p. 136.)
The fragment also refers to Coleridge’s criticisms (in the same chapter of Biographia) of Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Gypsies’, which led Wordsworth to revise the poem in 1820 and 1827.