10 Writers Who Wrote Famous Works While Wasted

Although drug addiction is better understood today, it’s by no means a new problem. Indeed, opium (in the form of laudanum) was widely, legally available two hundred years ago. It was this drug that would occupy much of the life of one of literature’s most celebrated poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, following his introduction to the drug as a youth when suffering recurrent bouts of agonising rheumatism.

One day in the summer of 1797, Coleridge passed out under the influence while reading a treatise on the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. In the third person introduction to the published work in 1816, Coleridge referred to having dreamed the entire poem in a drug-induced fancy:

“The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”

Fifty-four lines into the writing of the poem, Coleridge claimed to have been interrupted by a visitor, a man on business from the nearby village of Porlock, and when he returned to his notes, the poem had gone from his fevered brain. Since then, the device of ‘a person from Porlock’ has been used to describe any interruption which derails creativity.