Samuel Taylor Coleridge Drug Use

Immediately after we are born, we start picking up sounds; the sound of our mother’s voice, the music playing in the elevator on the way to the car, and the happy cheers from a small child seeing their new sibling for the first time. We are always listening–picking up on conversations not meant for our ears, eavesdropping on the gossip of the adult world, and finding the meaning in the portentous silence. From all these auditory stimuli, we piece together the world around us to better understand what is happening to us, around us, and the secret happenings that were not for us to know. Great writers are the ones who listen and say nothing–who take it all in and save their classified information for a day when all the right words flow and form one epic story of the wondrous world we live in.

Addiction can affect everyone differently, in writers it seems to both grant them a way to write, but it can hurt their overall quality. There are many examples of this from many writers, some of these affected individuals included, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen King, and Dorothy Parker. Addictions may give author's inspiration for their works but it can also harm their overall quality or it can change how they see themselves and how they work.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” Hard to argue semantics with a man who won a Nobel Prize in literature. From classic writers, such as Sir Author Conan Doyal and Edgar Allen Poe, to contemporary writers, such as, Mark Twain and Stephen King, they all started at the same place, the beginning. The most famous poems, plays, songs, books, and movies that have stood the test of time and a now considered masterpieces all have one thing in common, they are written well. They are immortalized because of the way the words were strung together and kept their audiences captivated. Those writers were able to mesmerize their audiences because they learned the fundamentals of the written word. Good writers understand the fundamentals build into the many variables that come together to create a well written piece.

The article ‘What Writing Is,’ narrated by Stephen King, endorses his personal perspective on writing and the vast passion it holds in his heart and mind. By comparing writing to telepathy, King emphasizes that writing is the epitome of a euphoric sense in terms of freedom and jubilance. Throughout this excerpt, King implies how writing is a part of life that should be centralized and embraced. Writing about telepathy, King proposes that we (the readers) are “downstream on the time-line.” We are in this present moment and as he composes from a juncture in the past, he projects images into our minds through the words he records. The fact that he brings telepathy in as an analogy to the significance of writing conveys his message that we may be reading anywhere or anytime; however, we can connect to each other’s minds despite the far distance.

It is fascinating to me to read the articles “Why I Write,” by George Orwell and Joan Didion. These authors touch on so many different topics for their reasons to writing. Their ideals are very much different, but their end results are the same, words on paper for people to read. Both authors made very descriptive points to how their minds wander on and off their

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and the other begins”(Poe, par. 3). Edgar Allan Poe, as well as many other writers throughout history, have questioned the ideological standards of society. A noteworthy debate that has surfaced time and time again through varying time periods is the dispute of logical and rational intelligence versus the impassioned emotion of one’s inner-self. These two conflicting philosophies divided and defined the different characteristics of literature during the Enlightenment era and the Romantic era. In order to understand why various authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Locke wrote in their differing styles, it is important to understand the historical context that inspired these authors. Although these approaches in style were exceedingly different, remarkable works of literature emerged from both time periods. While the various writers of the Enlightenment era had a more historical motivation for writing, the writers during the Romantic era composed an overall more amusing anthology of literary works.

Blake is nine years old. Blake’s father would abuse him and his mother until his father was charged for having heroin on him and showing up drunk to pick up Blake from school. His mother was mainly working all hours of the day due to the father not having a job and spending the money on drugs and alcohol. Blake spent most of his time in his bedroom not wanting to come out because he is scared of the world that is out there. Blake’s dad never let him leave the house. It was school and straight home kind of situation.

In the 1960s, drug culture was popularized through music and mass media, in our current society we still find this relevant. Although we are more knowledgeable about drugs and alcohol, “an estimated 208 million people internationally consume illegal drugs.” The question is why do we conform to a society that is dependent on such substances? Perhaps drug culture is still present due to the references we witness on a daily basis. Witnessing this has resulted in drugs being a constant norm in society, the recently published novel, The Other Wes Moore; addresses drug culture.

The desire to attain a pensive repercussion to readers through the work of literature is limned in Richard Wilbur's, The Writer. The poem follows the progression and contemplation of a father’s daughter who is aimed to write a story in the peace and serenity of her home. As he observes her, he finds that she types at unequal rates, breaking at certain intervals sometimes puzzled to regain her thoughts. “Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.” The father believes that her message is to be of significance and that she should not fret when stuck in a state of absence. He only desires the best for his daughter and acknowledges that despite the length of time needed, one should

Stephen King began abusing alcohol when he was sixteen years old. He cites his early childhood unhappiness as the catalyst for his substance abuse. Later, after King had established himself as a number one writer while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, he feared quitting drugs would end his career. With the help and support of his family and friends, King continues to maintain his sobriety by attending AA meetings regularly.

In Adam Barton’s film, The Stoned Ages (2011), researches the historical use of drugs and the institutional response upon the use of drugs by the masses. The Stoned Ages (2011) exposes an overwhelming discovery of drug use by people of ancient times and a connection of persistent patterns world-wide. Human beings have been in pursuit of expanding psychological capabilities from the beginning of human evolution (Barton, 2011). Social advancements depicted in The Stone Ages (2011), have derived from the use substances such as psychedelic mushrooms, during ancient rituals; permitting individuals to communicate with sacred Gods. Barton (2011) also discovers the use of drugs among Ancient Greek politicians as well, illustrating the wide use of drugs among people around the world and therefore theorizing the concept of drug use as an element of human behavior (Barton, 2011). According to Marc-Antoine Crocq’s (2007) research article summarizing the existence of drug use throughout the history of human-kind; “Schematically, psychoactive substances have been used (1) in religious ceremonies by priests; (ii) for medicinal purposes; or (iii) massively, as staple commodities, by large segments of the population in a socially approved way” (Crocq, 2007). Explained in Barton’s (2011) documentary however, the use of drugs had dire consequences caused by elitists’ hunger for power; Christians forbade the use of drugs with severe tactics of enforcement and lethally persecuting those who

William Dudley once commented, “Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.” Although Thomas de Quincy was known as a “drug addict” he produced some of his best work while being induced by opium, one of the stories that he created was called “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” He wrote the story as an autobiography, (take this part out!) in the hopes that the story will be instructive and make individuals be knowledgeable about the pleasure(use another word for pleasure) in a person’s life can lead to severe consequences. A writer’s style is what sets his/her writing apart and makes it unique, even thoughThomas de Quincy‘s mind was in stupor he put his wild vivid delusions down onto paper to form an story that had intense and astonishing

Opium is widely regarded to be the creative nucleus for a wide breadth of Romantic literary texts and authors. Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth were all among the number of notable Romantic figures and essayists who utilized opiates as a literary medium. This is hardly surprising as opium in many ways captured the zeitgeist of both early romanticism and the nineteenth century as a whole; it was fantastical, serene, all-consuming, and surreal. It would send its user into violent vacillations of highs and lows until they could no longer differentiate between reverie - a term De Quincey himself would often employ to illustrate the hallucinative states he would find himself in - and reality.

In reading such imaginative writers, I often envied their ability to craft worlds from the medium of words. In search of my own ability to create a cohesive

Wilde states that “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written” suggesting that a poet or artist does not set out to embody any kind of morality or message, but simply to take Reason and shape it with Imagination into something that is well written. This is why he criticizes “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things” as being “corrupt without being charming”, since they are the same kind of people who believe Reason should take precedence over Imagination. But Wilde’s theories on how Reason and Imagination shape Poetry are best summed up by his statement “The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium”. Thus Wilde posits that while the Reason of the life of a man may form the basis of Poetry, Poetry is an imperfect medium to portray such a thing, so Imagination must take over to shape it into a perfect thing. Wilde also provides ideas for specific things that shape Poetry in conjunction with Reason and Imagination, naming “Thought and language” as the “instruments of an art” and “Vice and virtue” as “materials for an art”.