Thomas De Quincey 
Suspiria de Profundis 

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.

About the author

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) is best known for
Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which recounted his struggles with addiction. A brilliant scholar of Latin, Greek, German, and English literature, De Quincey was plagued by debt and turned to journalism as a means of maintaining his wife and eight children. His writings for periodicals were enormously popular and covered a diverse range of subjects, from literary criticism to horror fiction.