Published in a new translation, and for the first time in a single-volume edition, On Wine and Hashish collects Baudelaire’s notions of the artificial paradises available to all drinkers and drug takers. In equal parts a celebration of the human capacity to escape the immediacy of the world as it is, and a warning against indulging the escapist impulse, On Wine and Hashish draws on its author’s experiences as a member of the famous ’Club des hachichins’ in Paris. It elaborates themes raised in his famous prose poem collection, Le Spleen de Paris, in which drunkenness - as provided by wine, poetry, or virtue - is celebrated in remarkable style.

Published in a new translation, and for the first time in a single-volume edition, On Wine and Hashish collects Baudelaire’s notions of the artificial paradises available to all drinkers and drug takers. In equal parts a celebration of the human capacity to escape the immediacy of the world as it is, and a warning against indulging the escapist impulse, On Wine and Hashish draws on its author’s experiences as a member of the famous ’Club des hachichins’ in Paris. It elaborates themes raised in his famous prose poem collection, Le Spleen de Paris, in which drunkenness - as provided by wine, poetry, or virtue - is celebrated in remarkable style.

Baudelaire claims that wine and hashish bring about a flight away from narrative time, initiating a relationship with the unknown: the ambivalence of memory, and a dangerous timelessness.

Inebriating in its anecdotal detail and thought-provoking in its depiction of the phoney exotica of excess, On Wine and Hashish illuminates Baudelaire’s own uncertain attitude to addiction.

Foreword by Margaret Drabble

Introduction

On Wine and Hashish

 Notes

The Poem of Hashish

 Notes

Appendix (Letter of Dedication)

Biographical note