Get Drunk By Baudelaire Essay

Getting drunk is often a favorite past time of adults. It is fun to go out for the night, order a few drinks, and begin detaching from the concrete world into an impaired drunken haze. Nothing matters to a person in this haze besides becoming more inebriated and sustaining the buzz. The next morning, the fun fades into headaches, nausea, and maybe even regret as a person is thrust back into the real world. According to Charles Baudelaire in his poem “Get Drunk”, the hangover should never be part of the equation. A person should be drunk always; there is no other suitable way to live.
Baudelaire does not necessarily mean to be drunk on alcohol. In his poem, he lists wine, poetry, or virtue as examples, but he does not intend to limit his audience to these options. He is saying that people should completely submerge themselves in their passions, whatever they may be, all the time. He suggests that people ignore the outside world, focusing only on their own pursuits. If a person was to sober up, he assures his audience that person would be urged by anything that flies, rocks, sighs, or sings that is would be the perfect time to get drunk. Without being drunk this way, is it too natural to succumb to the backbreaking burden of time.

While I respect his message of pursuing passions, this is not a practical way to live in the modern world. Whether a person is drunk with wine or poetry, he is still drunk. For instance, no positive connotation exists for being “drunk with power”. That phrase is only used when a person is abusing authority, never when he is leading with respect. His power consumes his brain, hinders his judgment on crucial decisions, and tunnels his vision exclusively to show what he wants to see. There is a fog separating reality from this person’s own world when there needs to be