Creativity and Receptivity in De Quincey's 1821 ‘Confessions’ and Baudelaire's 1860 Adaptation

Abstract

The 1821 ‘Confessions’ is an oft-cited example of the Romantic association between creativity and drug use. However, upon closer inspection, De Quincey's memoir appears less concerned with questions of creativity than with questions of receptivity and interpretation. This sets him apart from otherwise similar authors of addiction with whom he is frequently conflated: from Coleridge, naturally, but also from Baudelaire, whose 1860 Les Paradis artificiels, ostensibly a translation of De Quincey's work, diverges considerably from its source material. Baudelaire, a poet, uses De Quincey as a starting point to investigate the effects of drug use on the poetic imagination. But De Quincey himself is less interested in the effects of opium on creativity than its effects on memory and the intellect. Differently from Les Paradis artificiels, his memoir is concerned from beginning to end with the capacity of the opium-eater to feel, to analyse, and to interpret – and not necessarily to create.