Afloat in the Sea of Poppies

No writer documents more minutely the ravishments of opium addiction than de Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium-eater influenced contemporary scientific perceptions of the drug and seduced generations of Romantic writers and less illustrious souls hungering for  “a sabbath of repose” from the travails of pain and life that opium smoking induced. The book won him fame almost overnight and went into several editions, including an expanded version just three years before his death and many translations, notably an early version by Musset in 1828 that itself influenced Balzac, Gautier and Baudelaire. As a book, the Confessions is compelling in its eloquent descriptions of de Quincey’s hallucinations induced by “just, subtle, and mighty opium.” It is not difficult to be gripped by the sheer passion of the rhetoric as much as by an almost voyeuristic peering into the mind’s unmoored ramblings and  forbidden experiences as de Quincey describes his wanderings…