On Wine and Hashish (Hesperus Classics)

Baudelaire, Charles; Drabble, Margaret; Brown, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843910179 ISBN 13: 9781843910176

Publisher: Hesperus Press Ltd, 2002

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 induced by wine, poetry, or virtue—is celebrated in extraordinary style.

Review:

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

From the Publisher:

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