les deserts de l'amour,

I am told that he did not drink like an ordinary toper, but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he were accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill, ‘a worm that would not die.

—Charles Baudelaire on Edgar Allen Poe, from Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Works, 1852), via (via theshipthatflew)