Suspiria De Profundis

The Suspiria is a collection of prose poems, or what De Quincey called “impassioned prose,” erratically written and published starting in 1854. Each Suspiria is a short essay written in reflection of the opium dreams De Quincey would experience over the course of his lifetime addiction, and they are considered by some critics to be some of the finest examples of prose poetry in all of English literature. De Quincey originally planned them as a sequel of sorts to his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but the first set was published separately in Blackwood’s Magazine in the spring and summer of that 1854. De Quincey then published a revised version of those first Suspiria, along with several new ones, in his collected works. During his life he kept a master list of titles of the Suspiria he planned on writing, and completed several more before his death; those that survived time and fire were published posthumously in 1891.

Beginning with a discussion of Levana, the ancient Roman goddess of childbirth, De Quincey imagines three companions for her: Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears; Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs; and Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.

A book about opium usage and the effects of addiction on the authors life.

Thomas De Quincey was an English author during the Romantic movement, associating with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Best known for his command of the psychological fantasy story, De Quincey produced stories of the curious and obscure, but always with the traditional Romantic emphasis on feeling. His masterwork, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" (1821), stemmed from his own laudanum addiction, and was followed by "Suspiria de Profundis," a collection of essays which continued to capture the same dark brilliance as in "Confessions." The collection was originally published in fragmentary form, and remained unfinished upon De Quincey's death in 1859. This edition includes "The Affliction of Childhood," a reflection on the death of the author's two sisters in childhood, "Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow," one of his best-known works about the Roman goddess of childbirth, and "The English Mail-Coach," on the "grandeur and power" of the English mail-coach system.

IT is so painful to a lover of open-hearted sincerity that any indirect traits of vanity should even seem to creep into records of profound passion; and yet, on the other hand, it is so impossible, without an unnatural restraint upon the freedom of the narrative, to prevent oblique gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or elegance as did really surround my childhood, that on all accounts I think it better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of truth, in what order of society my family moved at the time from which this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it would happen that, merely by moving truly and faithfully through the circumstances of this early experience, I could hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of some higher rank than did really belong to my family.