Among the earliest artistic accounts of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier and Baudelaire's own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr Moreau to investigate the psychological and mind-enhancing effects of hashish, wine and opium. As well as providing an absorbing of nineteenth-century drug use, Hashish, Wine, Opium captures the spirit of French Romanticism, in its struggle to free the mind from the shackles of the humdrum and the conventional, and serves as a fascinating prologue to the psychedelic literature of the following centuries.
Author Biography
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-67) is most famous for his groundbreaking collection of verse The Flowers of Evil, but his essays, translations and prose poems have been equally influential. Theophile Gautier (1811-72) was an influential French writer, highly esteemed by authors as diverse as Flaubert and Oscar Wilde.
