Thomas de Quincey

Eater (1821), English author Thomas De Quincey chronicles his addiction to laudanum (a popular opium cocktail of the time) and the growing impact it had on his life. The first major work De Quincey published, it explores themes of addiction, drug culture, and the way addicts are treated in society; it is one of the first works to deal with these topics in modern times. It was controversial in its time for its overall positive depiction of the pleasure of opium, although De Quincey’s detailed depiction

Opium-eater” is written by Thomas De Quincey, which writes about his personal special experience of taking opium. The motive of this essay is to prove to the reader who thinks opium is merely a drug that is easily addicted to it and needs to be criticized. However, the case is to correct the misconception of public’s view on how opium affects its user, all while doing so through a nationalistic and authoritative lense, meanwhile revealing the social inequality. De Quincey first tried opium when he

expectation for overflowing emotion and and "beautiful things” starts increasing. Thomas De Quincey attempts to touch on this notion in his writing Confessions of an English Opium Eater when the protagonist dives into a world consisting of literally the function of drugs, dreams, hallucinations and everyday life’s encounters. Although drugs and its interference with everyday life routines and accomplishments, De Quincey shines the light on the effects, dangers, bliss, and confusion of the drug in a

Magical realism is a genre that incorporates magical and mystical elements into lives of ordinary people going about the monotonous activities of daily life. Everything would appear to be normal, except for a few elements that go beyond what would most likely be called ordinary. It’s a combination or merge of realist tradition in literature with the world of fantasy, as if fantasy were the most normal thing in the world. In this genre, the world that is created has a very thin line between what is

authors create some of their most phenomenal pieces using only a pen and their own minds? No, they don’t. There’s something sinister behind the masterpieces they create: drugs. Many authors, specifically authors during the Romantic Era, such as Thomas de Quincey, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were dependent on drugs either for medicinal or recreational purposes (Victorian Drug Use). Drugs fueled the creative drive those authors needed for their writing. But it doesn’t end there.

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.

In Confessions, De Quincey says that he hopes to present a "useful and instructive" record of what he feels to be a remarkable period in his life, and how he feels opium addiction played an important role in his writing. Up until this point, traditional English society had frowned upon people revealing their personal faults and discrepancies. Although it was undeniable that people had their flaws, it was an unspoken rule that you had to keep your weak side hidden. De Quincey opens with an apology

English author Thomas De Quincey comments on Shakespeare’s Macbeth saying he “felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate which succeeds to the murder of Duncan produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account.” In De Quincey’s influential essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” he conveys his ideas on the play through criticism, and why he was so puzzled by the knocking at the gate. He conveys his thoughts on why the one scene following

The Sublime in Three Sets Nature and the Romantics are two sides of the same coin. In almost every single poem we have read over the course of this semester we have been able to find hints of the natural world. These instances were moments of hunger. While industrialization was tearing landscapes up by their roots, Romantic poets were desperate to experience the euphoric sense of sublimity they had come to associate with the highest level of consciousness. However, this sense of sublimity is not

In his essay “How to have a conversation” originally published in the Financial Times, John McDermott, an economist, writes about his experience attending a self-help class on becoming a better conversationalist. McDermott initially introduces us to some of his ideal conversationalists as a way of benchmarking his ultimate goal; he then goes on to describe his evening and his interactions with his fellow attendees, and then ultimately provides his takeaways from the evening. McDermott’s use of analogy