SOURCE: "'High' Poetics: Baudelaire's Le Poeme du hachisch," in MLN, Vol. 109, No. 4, September, 1994, pp. 698-740.

In the following essay, Lyu discusses the tension in Baudelaire's Le Poème du haschisch between the poet's desire to pronounce a distinct separation of poetry and hashish and his ultimate inability to keep them apart.

From the very beginning of Le Poème du hachisch¹ in Les Paradis artificiels, Baudelaire is quite insistent in distinguishing his voice from the intoxicated voice, and his writing about intoxication from the lived experiences of intoxication themselves. It is indeed clearly stated at the end of the first section that his writing will be based on secondhand and not firsthand experiences and that it accounts for intoxicated moments lived by others but not by the poet himself. The poet speaks, or at least starts out by speaking, with a sober voice that is not and has...