Product Description

Initially composed for newspaper publication and inspired by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, Baudelaire's musings on wine and hashish provide acute - and fascinating - psychological insight into the mind of the addict. On Wine and Hashish asserts the ambivalence of memory, urging a union of willpower and sensual pleasure as Baudelaire claims that wine and hashish bring about an escape of narrative time. This characteristic theme anticipates his famous prose poems, 'Le Spleen de Paris', in which drunkenness - as provided by wine, poetry, or virtue - is celebrated in remarkable style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #219801 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-27
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Time Out, September 18-25, 2002
Reading Baudelaire's visionary poetics of intoxication, you can only conclude that the stuff was more potent in those days.

From the Publisher
New Translation of a key work by one of the most famour French poets

From the Author
The essays here presented, in a fine new translation by Andrew Brown, deal principally with the distortions and intensifications of perception induced by wine and hashish.

Customer Reviews

A book about 'good' and 'bad' drugs
Hesperus Press publishes a range of interesting, lesser-known titles by respected writers. And this is another example. This edition offers two `essays', the first providing a few pages on wine and it's joys followed by an equally brief section on hashish; and, the lengthier second article (The Poem of Hashish) is purely concerned with `weed': how to take it, how it's made, what it does, when not to do it etc. A nice translation captures the humour of some passages, particularly Baudelaire's accounts of individual experiences. I felt the book was an absorbing insight into 19th century drug culture including the ambiguity of the writer's personal views. Baudelaire dramatically describes the effects of hashish intoxication, ranging from the torture of profound anxiety to a meditative state of heightened benevolence and pleasantly enhanced sensory awareness.