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 u003ciu003eConfessions of an English Opium Eater,u003c/iu003e an impassioned account of his struggles with addiction, the author wrote the hypnotic prose poems of u003ciu003eSuspiria de Profundisu003c/iu003e ("Sighs from the Depths"). Like u003ciu003eConfessions,u003c/iu003e these short essays combined drug-induced visions with thought-provoking reflections on the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination.u003cbru003e 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. u003ciu003eSuspiria de Profundis u003c/iu003econtinues 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 u003ciu003eSuspiria u003c/iu003eand its 2018 remake.
