Alfred Tennyson's ‘The Lotos Eaters’ is, given its limitations in terms of length, apparently a less fruitful source for representations of addiction – if indeed it can be read as such – than De Quincey's Confessions. Nonetheless, despite being a poem inspired by Homer's Odyssey (a text which actually plays a significant if not explicit role, certainly in terms of cultural location, in this work), it raises a series of issues that place the previous analysis of De Quincey into perspective, and which contribute significantly to a debate about addiction and the networks that circulate around it in the context of nineteenth-century literature, culture and modernity. The most immediately noteworthy issue is, once again, the spectral qualities possessed by drug and by addict, characteristics that possess a cumulative significance in this discussion. However, other important features re-emerge in the poem, with notions of nation and class again playing important parts in a consideration of addiction and intoxication.