Opium Use and Romantic Women's Poetry

The Romantic women poets discussed in this essay 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 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 odes to opium demonstrate the presence of opium in the middle-class British home, the medicinal dependence on its use, and the longed-for mental escape it provided from the domestic realm. The poets' expressed desire for temporary escape reveals their conflict between familial responsibility, the obligations they have toward children and home, and their desire to dwell, if only temporarily, in an altered state where the pains and pressures of daily living are forgotten.