The impact for the first generation after the Industrial revolution was depressing, terrifying and intoxicating to a scarcely bearable degree. The Industrial Revolution meant for the very first time a great mass of people no longer suffered through a life of brute labor just to avoid starving, to a life of consistent natural disasters and diseases. In this important time for England the new way of poetry took a place, the poetry that latter will find the name as Romantic Poetry. Great poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley made huge impact on modern literature and have established outstanding legacy of English poems. However, not many of their readers notice the fact that number of Romantic poets where addicted to drugs such as opium and were finding their inspirations in opium houses.
Scott a historian of English literature mentions various forms of intoxication that were present in poets lives - from distilled spirits, opium, or nitrous oxide - which may also generate visual illusions. He testifies that poets' phenomena or as called "inspiration" was the result of opium. Very frequent use of the nitrous oxide which affects the senses so strongly, and produces a short but singular state of ecstasy, would probably be found to occasion this species of disorder" (Hayter, p. 24). Optical specters, then, may result from physical disorders as well as mental disorders, and they may also be solicited by the use of opium and other drugs. As has already occurred to the Coleridgeans in the audience, optical specters were not infrequent in Coleridge's experience: the opening in the wall that he observed in his room in Bristol, the apparition of the Captain that he saw at his fire-side in Malta, the luminescent letters that he inscribed on his thigh while lying in bed, the adulterous nighttime wanderings of Wordsworth that he thought he witnessed at an inn on their way to Coleorton. Scott recalls, too, Coleridge's reply to "a lady who asked him if he believed in ghosts:--'No, madam; I have seen too many myself'". While such symptoms may seem trivial and whimsical, Scott argues that the imagination has the power "to kill the body, even when its fantastic terrors cannot overcome the intellect" (Hayter, p.26-32). The mind, conscious of its own hallucinations, may be relieved from the horror of thinking that nightmare images are real, but that awareness cannot dispel the torment of knowing it has no control over their presence.
The most striking features about opium in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which also called in English literature the Romantic era are the contradictory facts that, while it was widely used and easily available, almost nothing was known about it. Medical knowledge of the drug's properties was scanty and unreliable: few people realized, for example, that opium was addictive, and no one understood that withdrawal symptoms were the result of discontinuation or diminished dosages. Indeed, everything that was known about it seemed positive and beneficial. Opium was used as a "cure" for a host of emotional and psychological. In Coleridge's day, he has pointed out, "most doctors and patients still thought of opium not as a dangerous addictive drug but mainly as a useful analgesic and tranquillizer of which every household should have a supply, for minor ailments and nervous crises of all kinds, much as aspirin is used today" (J. Barzun, p. 41).
All of the Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley are known to have used opium, as did many other prominent contemporaries. Supplies were readily available: in 1830, for instance, Britain imported 22,000 pounds of raw opium. Many Englishmen, like the eminently respectable poet-parson George Crabbe, who took opium in regular but moderate quantity for nearly forty years, was addicts in ignorance, and led stable and productive lives despite their habit. By and large, opium was taken for granted; and it was only the terrible experiences of such articulate addicts as Coleridge and DeQuincey that eventually began to bring the horrors of the drug to public attention.
Coleridge had used opium as early as 1791 and continued to use it occasionally, on medical advice, to alleviate pain from a series of physical and nervous ailments. "I am seriously ill", he wrote to Joseph Cottle in November 1796; "The complaint, my medical attendant says, is nervous - and originating in mental causes. I have a Blister under my right-ear and I take Laudanum every four hours, 25 drops each dose". The evidence of Coleridge's letters argues that during the period 1791-1800 he used opium only occasionally and almost always for medical reasons (Hayter, p.21). The turning-point, as e. L. Griggs has shown, may be traced to the winter and spring of Coleridge's first year at Greta Hall, Keswick, in 1800-1. During this period a prolonged and debilitating succession of illnesses, which Coleridge blamed on the raw, wet climate of the Lake District, caused him to use regular and increasingly larger doses of laudanum in an effort to assuage the torments of what he described as an "irregular Gout combined with frequent nephritic attacks" (Hayter, p. 21). But the opium cure proved ultimately to be more devastating in its effects than the troubles it was intended to treat, for such large quantities taken over so many months seduced him unwittingly into slavery to the drug. By the time he realized he was addicted, however, it was too late.
Contemporary medical science, it must be remembered, concerned itself largely with opium as a panacea and was almost powerless, owing to ignorance, to provide meaningful assistance to those who became victims of its prescriptions. In this light, Coleridge's struggle with his addiction must be seen as heroic and experimental; and it should be added that his experience of addiction led not only to sloth and self-pity, but more characteristically to a dearly purchased and altruistic desire to keep others out of the black pit into which he had fallen
But to return to the 1790s: what can we say about Coleridge's experience of opium at the time of composing Kubla Khan? Despite some dissent, the majority of recent scholars agree with e.L. Griggs that, until 1800-1, Coleridge was an occasional user of opium, usually for medicinal purposes, but sometimes for the pleasurable sensations which the drug induced, and that he was not, in any proper sense of the term, an opium-addict before this time. It is not surprising to find, then, that in the late 1790s Coleridge's opium experiences were essentially pleasurable; it was only in later years, when his slavery was firmly rooted. Opium, may well be describing a drug experience, tended to raise and spiritualize poets intellect, so that he or she could, like the Indian Vishnu, "float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos" (Hayter, p. 31). Such an experience and such a mood are reflected in Kubla Khan.
It is known that Coleridge took "two grains of Opium" before he wrote Kubla Khan; and this fact naturally raises the issue of the drug's effect on the poet's creative imagination. early critics, guided by Coleridge's statements in the 1816 Preface, assumed that there was a direct and immediate correlation between opium and imagination. In 1897 J.M. Robertson could not bring himself to doubt that "the special quality of this felicitous work Kubla Khan is to be attributed to its being all conceived and composed under the influence of opium"( Burnett, p. 15). The "great gift of opium" to men like Coleridge and DeQuincey "was access to a new world, one which ordinary mortals, hindered by terrestrial conceptions, can never, from mere description, quite comprehend". More recent criticism, however, grounded on modern medical studies, controverts such conclusions decisively. It is widely agreed now that persons of unstable psychological makeup are much more likely to become addicted to opiates than are normal ones. among such neurotic users of opium, "the intensity of the pleasure" produced by the drug seems (on the evidence of medical case-studies) "to be in direct proportion to the degree of instability"( Burnett, p.17). The relaxation of tension and conflict, accompanied by a sense of pleasant ease, occasionally helps to release for a time the neurotic person's natural powers of thought or imagination of action, though it does not give him powers that he did not have or change the character of his normal powers. With some unstable temperaments the euphoria may be intense. Its effect is usually to increase the person's satisfaction with his inner state of well-being, to turn his attention inward upon himself while diminishing his attention to external stimuli. Thus it sometimes encourages the mood in which daydreaming occurs. The narcosis of opium has been popularly described as having the effect of heightening and intensifying the acuteness of the senses. This it quite definitely does not do. If anything, the effect is the reverse.
Alethea Hayter, although she wishes to avoid the "extremes" of the positions of Abrams and Schneider, nevertheless comes much closer in her conclusions to the latter than to the former. Opium, she argues, can only work "On what is already there in a man's mind and memory", and, "if he already has a creative imagination and a tendency to dreams and hypnologic visions", then opium may intensify and focus his perceptions (Hayter, p.27). Her final verdict - which "can be no more than a hypothesis" - is that "the action of opium, though it can never be a substitute for innate imagination, can uncover that imagination while it is at work in a way which might enable an exceptionally gifted and self-aware writer to observe and learn from his own mental processes" The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from these various explorations of the relationship between opium and the operation of the creative imagination is that, while Kubla Khan might well not have been produced without opium, it most assuredly would never have been born except for the powerfully and innately imaginative mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
And, that established, we come to a more difficult problem: the "dream" of Kubla Khan. The poem, according to Coleridge's account in his 1816 Preface, resulted from a vision in which the poet "continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses", during which time the images of the poem "rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions". On the strength of this statement generations of readers accepted without question that Kubla Khan is the supreme example in English literature of the workings of the creative subconscious. "Nobody in his waking senses", Lowes exclaims of the last section of Kubla Khan, "could have fabricated those amazing eighteen lines". Many critics - even quite recent ones - would agree that in Kubla Khan "the process of creative composition is almost wholly "unconscious or subconscious".
Coleridge's own accounts are contradictory: in the 1816 Preface he declares the poem to have originated during "a profound sleep", but in the Crewe endnote it is said to have been "composed in a sort of Reverie (Barzun, p. 23). However, most readers are reluctant to accept Coleridge's account of the miraculous conception of Kubla Khan provided in the 1816 Preface; yet, most accept, too, that the poem did originate in a dream or, more probably, a daydream -- and that Kubla Khan is an inspired but consciously wrought artifact reproducing an actual semi-conscious experience in which day-dreaming, Coleridge's reading, and opium all had a part to play. "What we may feel inclined to accept", according to Molly Lefebure, "is that certain glimpses, or snatches, of Kubla Khan possibly derive from that dream."( Lefebure, p. 53)
From Coleridge's experience we may conclude that poets in Romantic era had experience of using opium as a tool for creative writing. However, it well known fact that opium was very common drug in 18th century and many people besides poets or literature writers were addicted to drug or were visiting opium houses. Also, it wouldn't be right to say that Romantism was build on drugs but rather on talent and inspiration that had poets in the time of industrial revolution.
Bibliography
1. Lefebure M. , W.J. Bate Coleridge: Humphrey House Coleridge (1953).
2. Hayter, A. Social England under the Regency (London, 1968).
3. Burnett, T.A.J. The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy -The Life and Times of Coleridge (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1981).
4. Lowes, Carolly. Our Tempestuous Day: A History of Regency England (New York: William Morrow, 1986).
5. J. Barzun, Romanticism and the Modern ego (1944).
