remusisdying

" it would be like analyzing ts eliot's work through a discussion of the layout of the pub in which he wrote."

So are you saying that, for instance, if I were able to correlate Eliot's environment with the imagery of his poems, it would not work? (An obvious example of environment affecting would could be Blake and 'London'.)

I think that it is very difficult to disassorciate seminal experiences from one's life from one's creations. It would be difficult to aruge that the affects of drugs, positive or not, does not affect the user.

I have read essays which attempt to correlate themes in Virigina Woolf's work with experiences she had 20 years prior to the work's creation. Is that an illegitimate claim?

A very obvious example would be Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', his attempt to capture the experience of the opium dream. Can we say that this poem is uninfluenced by the affects of drugs on the poem's creator? (A very cursory google search turns up this link as the first result).