Elaine,
 
        The classical statement of the influence of intoxication on
creativity is in Horace's EPISTLES ("no poems can please long, nor live,
which are written by water-drinkers"). By the time this trope reaches
Rabelais, it has expanded in authority to include both Homer and
Aeschylus. It is continuously voiced through the eighteenth century. In
the Romantic period, in England and France, the figure splits (De Quincey
and Gautier are the exceptions), and it announces that only artists who
have been forsaken by the true, spiritual, inspiration, will turn to the
false inspiration of alcohol and drugs (the "bastard Bacchus" of
Coleridge and the artificial paradises of Baudelaire). In Germany, the
figure is internalized and becomes the inspirational force of a new
Dionysianism. Thereafter it becomes an opinion not to be tolerated by
official culture, and its advocates (Symbolist poets, avant-garde
artistis, be bop musicians, beat poets, and, of course, shamans of
various aboriginal religions) become more and more marginalized.
 
Marty Roth
University of Minnesota