Word: opium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Behind their faith that dreams produced superior art, some Romantics pursued a corollary faith: that opium produced superior dreams. In a gracefully written, witty survey, British Scholar Alethea Hayter skeptically checks out a few case histories...
...most of the 19th century's mind blowers, opium meant laudanum, an alcoholic solution of the drug used as a common painkiller. Laudanum was cheaper than beer and regarded as scarcely more harmful. George IV took it for hangovers. Under such names as "Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup" and "Venice Treacle," it was prescribed for children more or less as aspirin is today...
Miss Hayter is definite about the effects of opium. It makes the user hypersensitive to sights and sounds while simultaneously putting a mystical distance between him and the real world. It obliterates the sense of time. In the early euphoric stages of addiction, it produces a serenity genteelly referred to as "invulnerable self-esteem." In later stages, it induces traumatic nightmares...
...casts her suspicious eye over the literary poppy field, Miss Hayter cannot be quite so definite about opium's effect on the working poet. Though Coleridge claimed that Kubla Khan sprang to his mind full-fledged from a dream -and is a fragment only because a tradesman interrupted him while he was writing it down-Miss Hayter is unimpressed. She admits that the euphonious fragment was the product of what the poet called "a sleep of the external senses." But she insists that his dreams usually were "disappointingly dull," and suggests that much hard polishing must have gone into...
Wilkie Collins, who regularly took what for others would have been lethal doses of laudanum, composed "a major piece of work," Miss Hayter admits, when he wrote The Moonstone-a Chinese box of a novel in which the actions of an opium-drugged man are described by an opium-using author. She points out, though, that Collins did not directly utilize his hallucinations. His forte-tight construction of narratives-was rare for a Victorian and hardly the sort of thing to be aided by drug taking. Quite the contrary...