The Confessions of an English Opium Eater show to the reader in a very direct style, what other authors have always pretended to hide: the pleasures of the drug in the body. Not only as a literary experience, better, a vital experience.

    The use of the genre of confession by this author isn´t free at all: he pretends to share his experiences with the reader and for this purpouse it´s always refering to him like in the preliminar confession: "will surprise my readers themselves..." and in all the work.

    From this lines I would like to claim Thomas de Quincey as a predecessor of th psicological introspection, that will develop later D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf in different ways and finally James Joyce, and specially for the romantic smell that give off his works such as Suspiria de profundis, and his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, of course.

    He is what literature considers a  "damned author", that has been forgotten in the libraries for several years and hidden by writers like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the poets of the first English Romanticism and also authors of the Lyrical Ballads and other works).

    For me (and others) he´s a writer of the avant-garde like others such as Artaud, Rimbaud, A. Dumas, Maupassant, Flaubert, that in some way he inspired. For this writers "the drug" "allows the access to a new dimmension of the world and different from this" (extracted from the Introduction to the Spanish version by Miguel Teruel).

"Maybe the history of the experience with drugs is the same story of the human experience and maybe is this also the history of literature. In any case, in the library of the world there´s a place according to his importance for the whole work of Thomas De Quincey." (from the Introduction to the Spanish version)
 

© 2001 Angel Company Albert.