Artificial Paradises: Baudelaire and the Psychedelic Experience
For many of us Baudelaire remains a name, a name dimly associated with some required course in the French language or less dimly figuring in an elective course on modern poetry. For the student of literature Charles Baudelaire is a giant whose magnificent perceptiveness lies at the basis of modern poetry. And for the acid head, whether he knows it or not, Baudelaire is an understanding loving brother. In 1851, six years before the publication of his one superb volume of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, he wrote an essay for Le Messager de V Assemblee, a Paris magazine, "On Wine and Hashish, compared as ways to the Multiplication of the Personality." Nine years later and one year before the expanded second edition of The Flowers of Evil, he published a slim volume called Artificial Paradises, Opium and Hashish, The following pages present a translation of selected paragraphs from both of these works in which Baudelaire explored the psychedelic experience. His description of the experience is fascinating because it is so like the stories told today by the LSD enthusiasts. And his analysis of the motivation of the addict and of the effect of the