By M.H. Abrams..

The effect of opium visions on the works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. “ Four eminent English authors were addicted to opium. Each author spent a considerable part of his life in a dream world which differs amazingly from that in which we live. Each author utilized the imagery from these dreams in his literary creations, and sometimes, under the direct inspiration of opium, achieved his best writing. Thus, a knowledge of the opium world these authors inhabited is essential to a complete understanding of their work. In the cases where critics have not entirely neglected this factor, their analysis of opium effects is too often a flight of conjecture unimpeded by any burden of definite knowledge. Strangely enough, although “there is hardly a more difficult chapter in the whole of pharmacology than . . . a thoroughly exact analysis of the effects of drugs,”(Louis Lewin, Phantastica, London, 1931, Preface, p. x.) this is just the field wherein each man seems to consider himself expert. When a critic of established reputation is misled into characterizing all of Coleridge’s finest poems as “the chance brain-blooms of a season of physiological ecstasy,”(John Mackinnon Robertson, New Essays towards a Critical Method, London, 1897, p. 190) it is time to examine the facts.

New York: Octagon Books, 1971. 104p.