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In the opium poem "To Opium," British romantic poet Maria Logan celebrates the transcendent power of the drug: "Did not thy magic pow'r supply, / A mild, tho' transient ray; / As meteors in a northern sky, / Shed artificial day."1 Just as the ethereal but brief light ray produced by the meteor stands in sharp relief to the unremarkable quality of the average day, the powerful but temporary effects of opium use alleviate some of the pressures of the typical domestic work day. Logan images the diseased body and restless mind which need liberation from perpetual confinement in the home. The male opium poets and their sublime, escapist representation of opium use have been studied; indeed, altered states of consciousness via the imagination are a conventional lens through which we understand traditional romanticism. However, much is leftto be written about women's writing, opium use, and the domestic scene in nineteenth-century culture.2 The women poets discussed here represent a larger cultural phenomenon where mothers and wives used opium on a regular basis for its medicinal purposes, demystifying its administration and its effects on the body. The opium poems written by romantic women writers offer a counter discourse to the traditional opium canon-texts written by Coleridge, de Quincy, and in the late century, Wilde-which orientalize and exoticize its use. In sharp contrast, Maria Logan's "To Opium," Henrietta O'Neill's "Ode to the Poppy," Anna Seward's "To the Poppy," and Sara Coleridge's "Poppies," incorporate opium use into the domestic hearth, its medicinal effects aiding in their wifely and motherly duties. The poems reflect the popular discourse of the period staging opium as necessary, common, and domestic.
The most studied male opium poets-Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey-believed opium granted them access to an imaginative realm unrestrained by the laws of time or space.3 In this intensely sensuous state, their creative powers are heightened, allowing them a unique perspective on the world around them. Recent studies explore the relationship between these poets' opium use and the British Empire, arguing evocations of the East reveal a national anxiety over its presence in the body politic.4 This essay explores the relationship between opium use and the domestic as opposed to the foreign. These women poets, like many other romantic women...