This isn't a text for which I have much admiration anyway — either way.

And the term "poison" is apt a couple more ways.  The book if I recall correctly mentions "wormwood"; one can do a forum search on the term; of all things, I just found out that the public library won't let me access the pertinent Wikipedia article, "absinthe."  It is quite credible to me that the work was produced under the influence of this or some other hallucinogen.

The Jerusalem Bible reports one theory, that the text as it stands now is a rather poorly done synthesis of two earlier, independent drafts by the same author; the point being that either one of the earlier drafts, in isolation, is far more coherent than the jumble we've got now.

What is certain that its form conforms to that which scholars call "apocalyptic," in which an anonymous author assumes the identity of an ancient hero in order to propound upon the events of the actual author's own time, in the form of  visions or revelations or angelic visitations to the ancient hero.  Ancient literature includes thousands of such texts, apparently.  The same scholars put Daniel in the same category.

P.

“What I admire is honesty and truth, no matter who, or what, the sources are.”
— Uri Yosef