Published in 1831, Poems—Poe’s third collection—seems to have a special connection to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In that memoir, Thomas De Quincey offers what he calls “an apocalypse of the world within me”—a revelation of internal experiences concealed from external view—as he describes, in detail, the ways that opium affected his perceptions and emotions. Sensational the work clearly is, but De Quincey’s text is also remarkable for its psychological realism, a quality that clearly appealed to Poe the tale writer. The modern discipline of psychology did not, of course, exist in antebellum America, but Poe was obviously fascinated by the mind, searching out its hidden places through fictional art. Poe’s creative investigations of controlled substances and their effects were a part of that work, as many critics have recognized. What was true of Poe’s fiction is also, to some extent, true of his early poetry, and the 1831 volume features material modeled upon De Quinceyan antecedents. In lyrics premiered in that collection, Poe makes literary use of four qualities of opium dreams identified in Confessions as well as orientalist imagery evocative of entrancement. Efforts to represent altered consciousness in poetic form, these experiments suggest that Poe’s creative interest in spatiotemporal perception itself antedated his turn to fiction writing and that his early poems were surprisingly innovative.