"High" Poetics: Baudelaire's Le Poeme du hachisch

From the very beginning of Le Poeme du hachisch1 in Les Paradis artificiels, Baudelaire is quite insistent in distinguishing his voice from the intoxicated voice, and his writing about intoxication from the lived experiences of intoxication themselves. It is indeed clearly stated at the end of the first section that his writing will be based on secondhand and not firsthand experiences and that it accounts for intoxicated moments lived by others but not by the poet himself. The poet speaks, or at least starts out by speaking, with a sober voice that is not and has not been intoxicated: