Humphry Davy’s Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide (1800) included descriptions of its inhalation by writers such as Coleridge. Nevertheless, Davy discriminated between scientific and literary discourse and used the key term ‘imagination’ in a sceptical sense defined by controlled trial in medicine. This essay examines the language of Davy’s text on each...
Of all the genealogies of Romantic phrases or ideas, perhaps none interests today’s students more than the line of descent by which a gnomic statement from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite’) becomes the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1954 exploration of psychedelic drug use, The Doors of...