Charles Pierre Baudelaire is considered to have been one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. A radical, revolutionary in his own time, Baudelaire led a tempestuous, often despairing lifestyle. Inspired by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, Baudelaire's musings on wine and hashish describe the ambivalence of memory and an escape from narrative time. A persisting theme of his poetry was that of drunkenness -- as induced by wine, poetry, or virtue -- which he celebrated in extraordinary style. Baudelaire was a member of the Club Des Hashichins (Hashish Club), founded in Paris around 1835, whose members met to enjoy cannabis. He wrote on hashish with great acuity, but it was from his studious note-taking, rather than in-depth personal experience. As Baudelaire put it, "wine makes men happy and sociable; hashish isolates them. Wine exalts the will; hashish annihilates it." When his book The Flowers of Evil appeared in 1857, all involved - author, publisher, and printer - were prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy.