The altering of senses has long been related to literature. Just think about all the writers of the Lost Generation who wouldn’t have written a line if they didn’t have booze. Would we have Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises if he hadn’t been part of the drunken festivities in Pamplona during his time in Spain? Or would F. Scott Fitzgerald ever have written The Great Gatsby if he hadn’t been as keen on parties as the protagonist of his novel? Yet, beyond narrative, drugs have been a much more mind-boggling substance, giving inspiration to compelling works of literature nobody should miss.
Khubla Khan (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
The Romantics were people who didn’t let the moral standards of their time impose over their wildest desires and their spirit of adventure. Coleridge enjoyed letting himself be taken by the power of his drugs that would make him hallucinate. At the time, it was easy to get a powerful dose of opium, as it was considered to be the only effective painkiller in the market. Once he let himself fall asleep under the influence of laudanum, he had an exuberant dream where he was pampered in the court of a Chinese emperor. As soon as he woke up, he went straight to his desk and penned the surreal epic Khubla Khan, his most renowned work. Sadly, while he was on the middle of his writing frenzy, a man knocked on his door, kicking him out of the fantasy that inspired his verse, and he never finished the poem. He remained an avid opium consumer until his death.
Howl (1956), Allen Ginsberg
“Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!”
The Beat generation was famous for mixing their work with active drug consumption. Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks while binging on speed and caffeine, and having this powerful fuel at his side. However, his work doesn’t compare to the hallucinatory craze that enfolds in the second part of Ginsberg’s most famous poem. The writer came to this poem after moving to Berkeley, California, and spending a night in San Francisco, where he would take such a mind-bending load of peyote that he would start seeing buildings as ancient monsters. But this vision would lead him to write one of the most lucid visions on the contradictory and chaotic nature of the modern world.
A Season in Hell (1873), Arthur Rimbaud
“Let it come, let it come,
The season we can love
So the green field
To oblivion falls,
Overgrown, flowering,
With incense and weeds
And the cruel noise
Of dirty flies.”
The enfant terrible of French literature, Rimbaud lived a life of adventure and excess. Many decadents such as Baudelaire wrote about the importance of alcohol in their work, as most of them were absinthe drinkers. According to his biographer, Rimbaud became an opium user during his first stay in London in 1871. During this stay he first started writing his longest, and one of his strangest, poems: A Season in Hell. The result is a narrative epic that could fog the mind of any reader trying to break into it: the story of a vicious descent into hell that could confound the mind of any possible reader.
“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), John Keats
“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne”
One of the quintessential English romantics, Keats is considered to be the most philosophical of the lot. Yet, there’s the chance that his dazzling intellect not only came from his own genius, but from his constant use of opium as a painkiller after he was struck by tuberculosis. In the poem where he sings in parallel to the melodious nightingale, he starts the work by describing the numbness he’s in as “a dull opiate”, and later on, he praises the bird’s music for the consolation it brings.
The Age of Anxiety (1947), W.B. Auden
“For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness, when what mother said seems
Such darling rubbish and the decent advice
Of the liberal weeklies as lost an art
As peasant pottery, for plainly it is not.”
Being one of T.S. Eliot’s protégés, one would imagine that Auden was a character that was as restrained and moral as him. Auden was a man of peace and habit, so much so that for almost thirty years he became a speedhead. After leaving to America in the late thirties, the author started a habit of consuming benzedrine on a regular basis. Because of the crazy fueling that the drug inspired in him, he also developed a dependency for sleeping pills. Could it be that the anxiety he saw in the city of New York was caused by the rush of amphetamines?
As you can see, a great part of the history of literature has been pushed by the engines of drug consumption. Can you think of any other works that could’ve made it to the list?
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