‘Power’ appears as a key term in a founding definition of Romantic studies: Thomas De Quincey's distinction between a literature of power and a literature of knowledge. De Quincey's version of this distinction first appeared in his ‘Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected’. Published as a series of five letters over 1823 in the London Magazine, the letters frame an idea of true education against the mechanical acquisition of knowledge, associated in the second letter with the Dissenter Isaac Watts and ‘the sectarian zeal of his party in religion’. In the third letter, published in March 1823, De Quincey wrote: ‘All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature to communicate knowledge.’ He went on to explain that by communicating power he meant to feel ‘vividly and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting.’ A note gives credit for his use of the word ‘power’ to describe this interior resource to years of conversation with Wordsworth. Power for De Quincey comes to define ‘literature’ against what he calls ‘anti-literature’, defined in relation to the dizzying proliferation of print, ‘our present enormous accumulation of books’. Later elaborations of the distinction in a review of an edition of Alexander Pope for the North British Review in 1848 developed his complaint against mechanical systems into an opposition between ‘a literature of power’, identified with Wordsworth's poetry, and a ‘literature of knowledge’ explicitly associated with the steam engine: ‘A good steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michel Angelo.’

The irony here is that when De Quincey first made his distinction in the 1820s the word ‘power’ was perhaps nowhere more prevalent in print than in discussions of the steam engine and the legacy of James Watt. Watt died in 1819, just two years before De Quincey first set out his distinction between ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’. Although the opposition between Wordsworth and Watt was not explicit in De Quincey's first knowledge/power distinction, it haunts his antagonism to mechanical method, his concern about the proliferation of print, and may even lurk as a homophone in his swipe at Isaac Watts.