1614
It starts as an argument
Tobacco arrived in Europe and was immediately controversial, which is the perfect condition for verse. King James I had already published his Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, and the poets picked sides.
The Scottish physician William Barclay answered the critics directly in a poem addressed To the Abusers of Tabacco:
Why doe you thus abuse this heauenlie plant,
The hope of health, the fewell of our life? William Barclay, To the Abusers of Tabacco
Note that the earliest English tobacco verse is not celebration, it is defence. Four hundred years later that is still the register most writing on this subject is written in, ours included.
the Jacobeans
Then it gets funny
Once the argument was old news the poets relaxed, and the seventeenth century produced the genuinely delightful stuff. Samuel Rowlands on the sheer self-sufficiency of a man with a pipe:
He needs no linnen for to foul
His fingers' ends to wipe,
That has his kitchen in a box,
And roast meat in a pipe. Samuel Rowlands, In Praise of Tobacco
And Barton Holiday, who gave tobacco a whole extended musical conceit and could not keep the grin out of it:
Earth ne'er did breed
Such a jovial weed,
Whereof to boast so proudly! Barton Holiday, Tobacco's a Musician
"Such a jovial weed." Four hundred years before anybody wrote the phrase adult consumer nicotine category.
1798
Southey writes an elegy for a used piece of chewing tobacco
Robert Southey, later Poet Laureate, wrote a mock-elegy addressed to a spent quid of tobacco. The joke is that he gives it the full funeral treatment, and the joke keeps working because underneath it he is quite sincerely grateful:
O, happy man! O, cast-off quid! is he
Who, like as thou, has comforted the poor? Robert Southey, Elegy on a Quid of Tobacco
That last line is the whole tradition in miniature. Not glamour, not rebellion, comfort, and specifically comfort available to people without much else.
the Victorians
Nicotia becomes a goddess
By the nineteenth century tobacco had a poetic name of its own, Nicotia, shortened from Linnaeus's Nicotiana, and recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary from the 1830s. The American poet James Russell Lowell went further than a name and made her a deity, declaring Nicotia “dearer to the Muse / Than all the grape's bewildering juice.”
Read that again, because it is a real claim and a bold one: better for poetry than wine. From a man who knew exactly how much of the Western canon runs on wine.
And in 1898 the tradition got its monument, Lyra Nicotiana: Poems and Verses Concerning Tobacco, an entire anthology, the existence of which tells you there was enough of this poetry to fill a book and sell it.
the twentieth century
The bards move to the recording studio, and then get quiet
The verse tradition does not die so much as change address. For most of the twentieth century tobacco lives in popular song, where it does the same three jobs it did for Rowlands and Southey: company, comfort, and a way of marking time.
We are not going to quote any of it, and the reason is worth saying plainly: song lyrics from this period are under copyright, and reproducing them without a licence is theft dressed up as curation. The pre-1900 verse above is public domain, which is exactly why we can give it to you whole.
What can be said without quoting a line is structural. Smoking survives in twentieth-century song as shorthand, for waiting, for the end of something, for a character sketch delivered in two words. It stops being the subject and becomes a prop. Nobody after Lowell writes an ode to the plant itself.
Four centuries of writing about tobacco, then a century of writing with it, then near silence.
The part worth noticing
The poems stopped. The people didn't.
It is tempting to read the silence as a verdict, as though the poets simply found out and stopped. That is not what happened. What happened is that the subject became unpublishable, and there is a difference between a thing losing its defenders and a thing losing permission to be spoken about warmly.
Meanwhile the affection Rowlands and Southey and Lowell were describing carried on exactly as before, in tens of millions of people, without a single poem to show for it. That is the odd position we are in: the most written-about pleasure in English literature between 1600 and 1900 now has essentially no literature at all.
We are not going to fix that with a price comparison site. But we can at least stop pretending the tradition never existed, and we can print the old verses where somebody might read them.
Viva la Nicotia.
Our anthem
We have had one since the 1600s
A brand in this category cannot borrow a song. Every anthem anyone would actually suggest is under copyright, and licensing one for commercial use is expensive, slow, and revocable the moment a rights-holder decides the association is embarrassing.
So we went further back, where the writing is free and the sentiment is better. Barton Holiday called his poem Tobacco's a Musician, and buried in it is a line that has been waiting four hundred years for a market like this one:
Earth ne'er did breed
Such a jovial weed,
Whereof to boast so proudly! Barton Holiday, Tobacco's a Musician
Whereof to boast so proudly. Not to apologise for. Not to manage, disclose or surcharge. To boast of, written by a man who never met a wellness programme and would not have understood the question.
That is the anthem. It is out of copyright, so it costs nothing and nobody can take it back. And the chorus is one line long:
Viva la Nicotia.
the thing they all reach for
Every one of them ends up writing about breath
Read enough of these and a pattern gets almost embarrassing. Whatever the poet set out to say, a joke, an argument, a complaint about the price, sooner or later the poem arrives at the smoke itself: the cloud that is there and then is not, the thing you can watch for a second, the vanishing. Four centuries of writers, most of whom never read one another, all reaching for the same image.
They were not being original. They were arriving, independently and very late, at a much older observation. In Biblical Hebrew the words for breath, wind, spirit and soul are nearly the same small handful of words, and hevel, the word Ecclesiastes repeats until it becomes a drumbeat, does not mean vanity at all. It means vapor. A visible breath on a cold morning. There, and then gone.
Two traditions with no contact between them looked at this and reached for exactly the same word.
Which is probably why the tobacco poem survived as a form for as long as it did. It was never really about the leaf. It was a licence to write about how briefly everything lasts, using a prop that made the point visible, once, every few minutes, in your own hand. The whole argument is here →
if you want to read further
Go and find the book
Lyra Nicotiana (1898) is out of copyright and scanned in full at the Internet Archive. It costs nothing, it is genuinely funny in places, and it is the single best evidence that people have been fond of this plant for as long as they have had it.
King James's Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604) is also free, and reads like every op-ed written since. The two together are a complete education in this argument, and they were both finished before 1900.
Nicotine is addictive, none of this is safe, and nothing here is a quit aid or a health product. Old poems are not evidence about anybody's lungs. If you do not already use nicotine, don't start. Adults 21+ only.
Where our name comes from →