ecial quality of this felicitous work [Kubla Khan] is to be attributed to its being all conceived and composed under the influence of opium"; and in 1934 M.H. Abrams declared that the "great gift of opium" to men like Coleridge and Dequincy "was access to a new world as different from this as Mars may be; and one which ordinary mortals, hindered by terrestrial conceptions, can never, from mere description, quite comprehend". More recent criticism, however, grounded on modern medical studies, controverts such conclusions decisively. According to Elisabeth Schneider, "it is widely agreed now that persons of unstable psychological makeup are much more likely to become addicted to opiates than are normal ones" and that, among such neurotic users of opium, "the intensity of the pleasure" produced by the drug seems (on the evidence of medical case-studies) "to be in direct proportion to the degree of instability". The explanation (she continues) of the supposed creative powers of opium lies in the euphoria that it produces: With some unstable temperaments the euphoria may be intense. Its effect is usually to increase the person's satisfaction with his inner state of well being, to turn his attention inward upon himself while diminishing his attention to external stimuli. Thus it sometimes encourages the mood in which daydreaming occurs. The narcosis of opium has been popularly described as having the effect of heightening and intensifying the acuteness of the senses. This it quite definitely does not do. If anything, the effect is the reverse.Alethea Hayter, although she wishes to avoid the "extremes" of the positions of Abrams and Schneider, nevertheless comes much closer in her conclusions to the latter than to the former. Opium, she argues, can only work "On what is already there in a man's mind and memory", and, "if he already has a creative imagination and a tendency to reverie, dreams and hypnologic visions...
