Book 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 induced by wine, poetry, or virtue—is celebrated in extraordinary style. Foreword by Margaret Drabble.

From the Publisher
Hesperus Press, as suggested by their Latin motto, Et remotissima prope, is dedicated to bringing near what is far—far both in space and time. Works by illustrious authors, often unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English–speaking world, are made accessible through a completely fresh editorial approach or new translations. Through these short classic works, which feature forewords by leading contemporary authors, the modern reader will be introduced to the greatest writers of Europe and America. An elegantly designed series of exceptional books.

From the Inside Flap
Wine elevates the will, hashish annihilates it. Wine is a physical aid, hashish a weapon for the suicidal. Wine makes one good and out-going. Hashish is isolating.

About the Author
Charles Baudelaire is one of France's greatest poets. He also penned a number of remarkable prose pieces and critical writings.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hesperus Press, as suggested by their Latin motto, Et remotissima prope, is dedicated to bringing near what is far—far both in space and time. Works by illustrious authors, often unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English–speaking world, are made accessible through a completely fresh editorial approach or new translations. Through these short classic works, which feature forewords by leading contemporary authors, the modern reader will be introduced to the greatest writers of Europe and America. An elegantly designed series of exceptional books.

SYNOPSIS

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. Foreword by Margaret Drabble.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium," Thomas De Quincey wrote, "of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member." Many lonely worshippers congregate in Under The Influence: The Literature of Addiction, an anthology from Modern Library edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse that collects examples of almost two centuries of drug literature -- from De Quincey's early-eighteenth-century memoir, "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," to the anonymous 2001 Granta essay "Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater." Drugs may lie at the book's heart, but compulsions related to gambling, food, and sex are also represented.

Missing from the collection is one of De Quincey's most devoted readers and a fellow opium fiend, Charles Baudelaire, who counselled readers to be drunk continually, "on wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish." But he also thought drugs were a perversion of man's taste for the infinite and that great minds could furnish their own intoxicants. In On Wine and Hashish, translated from the French by Andrew Brown, Baudelaire argues that the great poets can "by the pure and free exercise of their will reach a state in which they are at once cause and effect, subject and object, hypnotist and sleepwalker."