Thomas de Quincey wrote: “Confessions of an English Opium Eater‘, inaugurating a modern model of confessional writing, which would later fascinate Edgar Allan Poe Yeah Charles Baudelaire. Here is a cursed triad where exploration … It’s often the loss. De Quincey saw opium consumption not as a hidden and twisted desire, but as a path to the sublime and the obscure.
He thus frequented the vision, or the nightmare, two ecstasies of precipice which were a habit with Baudelaire, who translated De Quincey into French, and incorporated it under master condition in ‘Artificial paradises‘. Opium does not become an axis or a key in Poe’s work, but the altered journeys and the hallucinatory haze, or almost, appear in the background in stories like ‘Ligeia‘ either ‘Berenice‘.
He left us told Borges that the world is an activity of the mind, and Thomas de Quincey goes even further in illumination, because he explores a secret life in the mind. In his ironic essay ‘Murder considered one of the fine arts», De Quincey treated murder as an aesthetic discipline. This suspension of morality openly influenced Poe, who in stories like “The revealing heart‘ either ‘The black cat“transforms the crime into an intimate experience, told by the murderer himself.
Baudelaire took up this aesthetic of transgression in “The flowers of evilwhere the corrupt includes beauty. The sinuous and visionary style of Thmas De Quincey serves as a hinge between an introspective romanticism and a literary modernity crossed by anxiety, the city, decadence and the unconscious.
Poe anchored this transition in the story. Baudelaire, in poetry, inaugurating modern poetry. De Quincey, Poé, Baudelaire. Here is a trio of alternatives, sometimes the same: the transport of the senses, the limit of infinity, the atmosphere of hallucination, but of a hallucination which often has the fury of the unknown on a daily basis. Lust resides in evil, wrote Baudelaire. The phrase could be written by Thomas de Quincey, a decisive precursor of cursed and modern sensibilities.
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