Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is the ultimate symbolic incarnation of the snake oil Baudelaire is trying to sell. He actually asserts that that it is difficult to find a passage written by Poe is not a manifestation of the powers of the imagination unleashed by indulging in opium. There’s just one problem: Poe wasn’t the opium addict that Baudelaire mistakes him for courtesy of a defaming article published by a rival following the great writer’s death. Poe’s flights of imagination spring from exactly that: his imagination. Sorry, Chuck, but no opium was involved, at least not in any significant way.
Hashish
Hashish is Baudelaire’s symbol of how to unleash the imagination through a completely moral and perfectly natural means of ingesting of substances. Well, that was his intention, anyway. In reality, the claims that hashish can intensity awareness of form and color and grammar—yeah, grammar—turns it into a symbol of absolutely every artificial means of stimulating the imagination that only seems to stimulate the imagination because the interpretative senses of one’s self-expression have actually been dulled by the very product one suspects of doing just the opposite. Certain drugs have been proven to stimulate the desire and energy for creative expression. None have yet been effectively proven to actually make one more imaginative or creative. If that were the case, lousy books, music, films and ideas would not outnumber the exceptional output by such an enormous ratio.
Opium
Okay, get ready, because here is exactly how the symbolism gets weird. Access to opium, for Baudelaire, is the symbolic equivalent of the fire which Prometheus stole: it is your ticket to knowing what the gods know. Seriously, the sentence which follows can actually be found within the book. Put there on purpose by Baudelaire and don’t believe anyone who tries to convince you that this intention was ironic:
“You alone give man these treasures, and you possess the keys to heaven, just, subtle and powerful opium!”
Thomas de Quincey
While Baudelaire mistakenly identifies Poe as the symbolic portrait of the genius which can be established in a literary pursuit by indulging in drugs, it is the English writer Thomas de Quincey who is really at the heart of this work. Baudelaire openly admits his text was inspired by the writer’s own Confessions of an Opium Eater. And Baudelaire writes pages and pages and pages about de Quincey in an effort to cast him as the ultimate symbol of the godfather of writing under the influence. And he succeeds. Of course, it is important to remember that most people have never heard of de Quincey and of those that have, it is just that one book they can name despite an admittedly impressive and prolific career.
The Brocken Specter
The Brocken Specter describe a strange visual phenomenon in which, under very precise conditions, the shadow of a person takes on a gigantic aspect in which the shadow of their head is surrounded by a halo of light. That Baudelaire transforms this purely visual spectacle into a brilliant use of imagery cannot be denied, but his attempt to pretzel it into a symbolic representation of the process of abusing opium is less successfully conveyed. Points for trying, though, because the imagery describing the Brocken Specter is a highlight of the text.
