![]() The text, conceived as an autobiographical essay, a diary of his opium addiction, appeared in 1821 in London Magazine, and the interest and commotion it caused was such that he advised to carry out a book edition the following year. His intention in writing the Confessions was not so much to narrate the effects of this drug as to expose its influences to a mind, his own, which he knew to be privileged, endowed with unusual faculties. Opium is associated in him with the ability to dream and with an extreme intellectual sensitivity: without these, opium would have been a mere chronic, vulgar and sterile disease. ![]() But for De Quincey the opium was only a vehicle, an accident from which to get a literary advantage. ![]() However, it is paradoxical that an original character and endowed with an extraordinary sensitivity like that of Thomas De Quincey turned his addiction to opium into a determining factor in his life. ![]() Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), one of the best prose writers in the English language, owes his universal fame to these Confessions of an English opium eater. ![]()
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