Thomas De Quincey 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.

English writer Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) wrote prolifically and in numerous fields, ranging from fiction to biography to economics, and often crossing genre boundaries in unclassifiable works that mixed exposition of others' ideas with autobiography and personal reflections. He remains best known, however, for a single work: Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). That work, too, was difficult to classify-it mixed autobiographical elements with description and evaluation of the effects of the addictive, analgesic, and psychoactive drug named in its title.Includes a biography of the author.

A legal and readily available painkiller in the nineteenth century, laudanum was a source of both pleasure and pain for author Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859). After achieving overnight success with Confessions of an English Opium Eater, an impassioned account of his struggles with addiction, the author wrote the hypnotic prose poems of Suspiria de Profundis ("Sighs from the Depths"). Like Confessions, these short essays combined drug-induced visions with thought-provoking reflections on the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. With these books, De Quincey inaugurated the genre of addiction literature, a tradition furthered by Charles Baudelaire, William S. Burroughs, and a growing number of modern writers. Suspiria de Profundis continues to influence contemporary artists with the best known of its psychological fantasies, "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," which centers on myths related to the Roman goddess of childbirth and was the source for the classic 1977 horror film Suspiria and its 2018 remake.

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