Abstract
‘Kubla Khan’ is a fascinating and exasperating poem. Almost everyone has read it, almost everyone has been charmed by its magic, almost everyone thinks he knows what it is about — and almost everyone, it seems, has felt impelled to write about it. It must surely be true that no poem of comparable length in English or any other language has been the subject of so much critical commentary. Its fifty-four lines have spawned thousands of pages of discussion and analysis. ‘Kubla Khan’ is the sole or a major subject in five book-length studies;1 close to 150 articles and book-chapters (doubtless I have missed some others) have been devoted exclusively to it; and brief notes and incidental comments on it are without number. Despite this deluge, however, there is no critical unanimity and very little agreement on a number of important issues connected with the poem: its date of composition, its ‘meaning’, its sources in Coleridge’s reading and observation of nature, its structural integrity (i.e. fragment versus complete poem), and its relationship to the Preface by which Coleridge introduced it on its first publication in 1816.
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If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, & have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye! and what then? (CN, III no. 4287)
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Notes
John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston, Mass., 1927; rev. edn, 1930; repr. 1964)
Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and ‘Kubla Khan’ (Chicago, 1953; London, 1954; repr. New York, 1970)
John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959; repr. 1970)
Marshall Suther, Visions of Xanadu (New York and London, 1965)
E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (London, 1975)
George Watson, ‘The Meaning of “Kubla Khan”’, REL, ii (1961) 21–9.
In fairness, I hasten to add that, in the revised version of this paper which appears as chapter 8 in Mr Watson’s Coleridge the Poet (London, 1966), he begins by saying that ‘this chapter is bound to be speculative’ and by confessing that ‘some aspects of “Kubla Khan” remain inexplicable’ (p. 117).
Quoted in Morchard Bishop, ‘The Farmhouse of Kubla Khan’, TLS, 10 May 1957, p. 293.
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols (London, 1941; repr. 1959) i 34.
H. M. Margoliouth, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1795–1834 (London, 1953; repr. New York, 1966) p. 49.
J. D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of his Life (London and New York, 1894; repr. Highgate, 1970) p. 89.
Malcolm Elwin, The First Romantics (London, 1947) pp. 226–32.
Lawrence Hanson, The Life of S. T. Coleridge: The Early Years (London and New York, 1938; repr. New York, 1962) pp. 259–60, 282 and 487 n.115.
E. K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study (Oxford, 1938; repr. 1967) p. 101
To my knowledge only two other serious attempts have been made to defend a 1799–1800 date: Warren Ober, ‘Southey, Coleridge, and “Kubla Khan”’, JEGP, lviii (1959) 414–22
Alice Snyder, ‘The Manuscript of “Kubla Khan”’, TLS, 2 Aug 1934, p. 541.
Wylie Sypher, ‘Coleridge’s Somerset: a Byway to Xanadu’, PQ, xviii (1939) 353–66
Molly Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (London, 1974; repr. 1977) pp. 251–2.
Mark Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1967) pp. 208–9 n. 33.
John Beer, ‘Coleridge and Poetry: I. Poems of the Supernatural’, in S. T. Coleridge (Writers and their Background series), ed. R. L. Brett (London, 1971) pp. 53–4 n. 1.
Bishop, in TLS, 10 May 1957, p. 293.
D.H. Karrfalt, ‘Another Note on “Kubla Khan” and Coleridge’s Retirement to Ash Farm’, N&Q n.s. xiii (1966) 171–2.
and Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (Masters of World Literature series) (New York, 1968; London, 1969; repr. 1973) p. 76 n. 7
See Coleridge’s Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare, ed. T. Ashe (London, 1897) p. 17
and The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. Roger Ingpen, 2 vols (London, 1903) ii 58.
T. C. Skeat, ‘Kubla Khan’, British Museum Quarterly, xxvi (1963) 78.
E. H. W. Meyerstein, ‘A Manuscript of “Kubla Khan”’, TLS, 12 Jan 1951, p. 21
John Shelton, ‘The Autograph Manuscript of “Kubla Khan” and an Interpretation’, REL, vii (1966) 30–42
Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London, 1968; repr. 1971) pp. 29–30.
E. L. Griggs, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Opium’, Huntington Library Quarterly, xvii (1954) 357–78.
J. M. Robertson, New Essays towards a Critical Method (London and New York, 1897) p. 138
M. H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crab be, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1934) p. 4
See also R. C. Bald, ‘Coleridge and The Ancient Mariner: Addenda to The Road to Xanadu’, in Nineteenth-Century Studies, ed. H. Davis, W. C. De Vane, and R. C. Bald (Ithaca, NY, 1940) pp. 1–45.
F. W. Bateson, The Scholar-Critic: An Introduction to Literary Research (London, 1972) p. 56.
Thomas Love Peacock, ‘An Essay on Fashionable Literature’, in The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols (London, 1924–34; repr. New York, 1967) viii 290.
Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (New York, 1971; London, 1972) p. 343.
Max F. Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge (Detroit, 1963; rev. edn 1964) pp. 114–24
For a similar view, see R. Smith, ‘Spontaneous Overflow’, LiNQ: Literature in North Queensland, ii (1973) 25–8.
Edward Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron (Seattle and London, 1963; rev. edn 1965) p. 85.
Alicia Martinez, ‘Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”, and the Contingent’, Concerning Poetry, x (1977) 59.
Bernard Breyer, ‘Towards an Interpretation of Kubla Khan’, in English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, Va, 1951) pp. 286–7.
Irene Chayes, ‘“Kubla Khan” and the Creative Process’, SIR, vi (1966) 1–21.
Elisabeth Schneider, ‘The “Dream” of Kubla Khan’, PMLA, lx (1945) 784–801.
James Hoyle, ‘“Kubla Khan” as an Elated Experience’, Literature and Psychology, xvi (1966) 27–39.
Minnow among Tritons: Mrs S. T. C.’s Letters to Thomas Poole, ed. Stephen Potter (London, 1934) p. 13.
E. H. W. Meyerstein, ‘Completeness of Kubla Khan’, TLS, 30 Oct 1937, p. 803.
Also Humphry House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951–52 (London, 1953; repr. 1969) p. 114: ‘If Coleridge had never published his Preface, who would have thought of “Kubla Khan” as a fragment?’
S. K. Heninger, Jr, ‘A Jungian Reading of “Kubla Khan”’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xviii (1959–60) 358–67, esp. p. 367
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York, 1961; rev. edn Ithaca, NY, and London, 1971) pp. 217–20
Kenneth Burke, ‘“Kubla Khan”, Proto-Surrealist Poem’, in his Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., and London, 1966) pp. 202–22, esp. pp. 217–18
Norman Mackenzie, ‘“Kubla Khan”: a Poem of Creative Agony and Loss’, English Miscellany, xx (1969) 229–40
R. H. Fogle, ‘The Romantic Unity of “Kubla Khan”’, College English, xiii (1951) 13–19; repr. ibid., xxii (1960–1) 112–16.
The prototype of Fogle’s view may be found in N. B. Allen, ‘A Note on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”’, MLN, lvii (1942) 108–13.
Alan Purves, ‘Formal Structure in “Kubla Khan”’, SIR i (1962) 187–91
See also Carl Woodring, ‘Coleridge and the Khan’, EIC, ix (1959) 361–8.
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London, 1933; repr. 1975) p. 146.
and L. D. Berkoben, Coleridge’s Decline as a Poet (Paris and The Hague, 1975) pp. 108–20.
The case for biblical influences on ‘Kubla Khan’ from the books of Ezekiel and Revelation is well argued by H. W. Piper, ‘The Two Paradises in Kubla Khan’, RES, n.s. xxvii (1976) 148–58.
On the possible influence of the apocryphal book of Tobit, see T. Copeland, ‘A Woman Wailing for her Demon Lover’, RES, xvii (1941) 87–90.
R. H. Milner, ‘Coleridge’s “Sacred River”’, TLS, 18 May 1951, p. 309
Robert F. Fleissner, ‘Hwœt! Wē Gardēna: “Kubla Khan” and those Anglo-Saxon Words’, TWC, v (1974) 50.
Robert F. Fleissner, ‘“Kubla Khan” and “Tom Jones”: an Unnoticed Parallel’, N&Q, n.s. vii (1960) 103–5.
Susan M. Passler, ‘Coleridge, Fielding and Arthur Murphy’, TWC, v (1974) 55–8
Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Kubla Khan in Wales: Hafod and the Devil’s Bridge’, Cornhill Magazine, no. 970 (Spring 1947) 275–83
George Whalley, ‘Romantic Chasms’, TLS, 21 June 1947, p. 309
Eugene L. Stelzig, ‘The Landscape of “Kubla Khan” and the Valley of Rocks’, TWC, vi (1975) 316–18
Lane Cooper, ‘The Abyssinian Paradise in Coleridge and Milton’, MP, iii (1906) 327–32
Howard Parsons, ‘The Sources of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”’, N&Q, cxcvi (1951) 233–5
Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London, 1970) pp. 246, 235.
Leigh Hunt, ‘Sketches of the Living Poets’, Examiner, 21 Oct 1821, as repr. in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, p. 475.
Hazlitt’s review of the Christabel volume in the Critical Review, May 1816, as repr. in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, p. 208.
Algernon Swinburne, Essays and Studies, 5th edn (London, 1901) p. 263.
For a survey of other Victorian assessments, see R. Hoffpauir, ‘“Kubla Khan” and the Critics: Romantic Madness as Poetic Theme and Critical Response’, English Studies in Canada, ii (1976) 402–22, esp. pp. 405–9.
William Walsh, Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance (London, 1967) p. 111
H. H. Meier, ‘Ancient Lights on Kubla’s Lines’, English Studies (Amsterdam), xlvi (1965) 15–29, esp. pp. 26–7.
Charles Moorman, ‘The Imagery of “Kubla Khan”’, N&Q, n.s. vi (1959) 321–4
and D. B. Schneider, ‘The Structure of Kubla Khar’, American Notes and Queries, i (1963) 68–70
Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London, 1924) pp. 156–9.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1925; repr. New York, 1968) p. 30.
Douglas Angus, ‘The Theme of Love and Guilt in Coleridge’s Three Major Poems’, JEGP, lix (1960) 655–68
Eugene Sloane, ‘Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: the Living Catacombs of the Mind’, American Imago, xxix (1972) 97–122
and Gerald Enscoe, ‘Ambivalence in “Kubla Khan”: the Cavern and the Dome’, Bucknell Review, xii (1964) 29–36
James Bramwell, ‘Kubla Khan — Coleridge’s Fall?’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, liii (1952) 449–66
and Eli Marcovitz, ‘Bemoaning the Lost Dream: Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Addiction’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis, xlv (1964) 411–25 (the passage quoted is on p. 422)
H. S. and D. T. Bliss, ‘Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”’, American Imago, vi (1949) 261–73
James F. Hoyle, ‘“Kubla Khan” as an Elated Experience’, Literature and Psychology, xvi (1966) 27–39
Kathleen Raine, ‘Traditional Symbolism in Kubla Khan’, Sewanee Review, lxxii (1964) 626–42
Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (Oxford, 1934) pp. 90–115
and N. L. Goldstein, ‘Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: Mythic Unity and an Analogue in Folklore and Legend’, Queen’s Quarterly, lxxv (1968) 642–50.
and H. M. Brown, ‘Archetypal Patterns in “Kubla Khan”’, Proceedings of the Conference of College Teachers of English of Texas, xxxiii (1968) 13–17
Robert F. Fleissner, ‘“Kubla Khan” as an Integrationist Poem’, Negro American Literature Forum, viii (1974) 254–6.
Woodring, in EIC, IX (1959) 361–8
and Norman Rudich, ‘Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: his Anti-political Vision’, in Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, ed. N. Rudich (Palo Alto, Calif., 1976) pp. 215–41
Keats, letter of 21 Dec 1817: see Letters of John Keats, ed. R. Gittings (London, 1970) p. 43.
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© 1983 John Spencer Hill
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Hill, J.S. (1983). ‘Kubla Khan’. In: A Coleridge Companion. Literary Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03798-8_3
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