One should always be drunk. That's all that matters... But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

This line comes from Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Enivrez-vous” (“Get Drunk”), part of his late collection of prose poems often translated as Paris Spleen. Written in the milieu of mid-19th-century Paris, the piece reflects Baudelaire’s preoccupation with modern urban life, boredom (spleen), and the search for transcendence amid time’s pressures. Rather than a simple endorsement of alcohol, the poem frames “drunkenness” as a chosen state of heightened intensity—an antidote to the crushing awareness of passing time and the burdens of ordinary existence.

Baudelaire uses “drunk” metaphorically to argue that one must remain absorbed in something that lifts the spirit above routine and despair. The imperative is existential: if you are not “intoxicated” by wine, poetry, or virtue, you will feel time’s weight and become a slave to dullness and suffering. The triad is telling—sensual pleasure (wine), aesthetic rapture (poetry), and moral elevation (virtue) are offered as different routes to the same goal: intensity of being. The quote’s urgency (“get drunk”) captures Baudelaire’s modernist sense that meaning must be actively, repeatedly made.