book review
Book reviews on cannabis, marijuana, and pot related literature, cookbooks, and material.
Who Was Fitz Hugh Ludlow?
I was never particularly interested in 19th-century literature. There were so many things our English teachers didn't tell us, especially when it came to the counterculture underground books of the Victorian era. They never mentioned that Charles Dickens, for instance, wrote his last novel stoned. Several key scenes in The Mystery of Edwin Drood were set in an opium den and hash lounge. Or they'd ramble on and on about John Greenleaf Whittier's "Snowbound," never mentioning his interesting little poem "The Haschich." Sometimes we'd get maybe an hour of English class devoted to an excerpt from Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), because it was the first great English drug tale and influenced all the Romantic writers. But we never heard about, America's first great drug writer, Fitz Hugh Ludlow.
By Frank White9 years ago in Potent
Literature and Marijuana: Counter-Culture History Through the Years. Top Story - March 2017.
America's literary counter-culture movement began after the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when those to our South came northward, and, in turn, brought their natural relaxant with them: marijuana. Granted, the counter-culture had begun to start over in Europe long before America joined in on the fun. James Joyce had already kicked off the modernist movement with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that deliberately broke every established rule of literature.
By Anthony Gramuglia9 years ago in Potent
Who Was Allen Ginsberg?
As a poet, Allen Ginsberg was able to relate his feelings on being homosexual and a marijuana smoker in his poetry, achieving the status of an almost mystic figure. He had an intense spiritual life and tried to expedite whatever came to his head, and to explore what his mind wanted to pursue.
By Wendy Weedler9 years ago in Potent
