BAUDELAIRE, SYMONS AND THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISE
BAUDELAIRE, SYMONS AND THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISE

Summary/Abstract: Charles Baudelaire is the first European to write a comparative study of wine, hashish and opium from both aesthetic and ethical point of view, Artificial Paradises (1860), a book that shocks, eliminates taboos and influences other symbolist writers from all over Europe. It is the case of Arthur Symons, an English poet, translator and critic, who writes in Baudelairian style the article, The Gateway to an Artificial Paradise: the Effects of Hashish and Opium Compared, published in Vanity Fair, in 1918. Experimenting with drugs is the way that the symbolist writers created synaesthesia, the aesthetic symbolist process by which feelings of different nature (colors, sounds or odors) are associated.

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