“All Beauty Must Die”: The Aesthetics of Murder, from Thomas De Quincey to Nick Cave

Abstract

Had Thomas De Quincey not already gained notoriety as the author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), he would most assuredly have been immortalized on the strength of his remarkable series of “murder” essays which followed. In his paper, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth ” (1823), De Quincey sought an explanation for why certain acts of murder had greater purchase than others on the human capacity for sympathy; why, that is, certain murders seemed more pathetic (in the sense of pathos), the plight of their victims more poignant, the deed more terrifying-in short, why certain murders were productive of that peculiar experience known as sublimity. 1 He followed this initial ..