Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Anthony John Harding (essay date 1982)
Anthony John Harding (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: “Inspiration and the Historical Sense in ‘Kubla Khan,’” Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 3-8.
[In the following essay, Harding discusses the impact of the Old Testament on Romantic poetry, focusing specifically on “Kubla Khan” as an example.]
Coleridge's admiration for the poetry of the Old Testament is well-known. To Coleridge, the Hebrew poets possessed in exemplary form the power of Imagination, the “modifying, and co-adunating Faculty,”1 which long before the writing of Biographia Literaria took a central place in his critical thought. Their poetry, in contrast to that of the Greeks, exhibited a profound sense of the “one Life” uniting all of nature, that sense to which Coleridge himself tried to give expression in “The Eolian Harp,” where the phrase “animated nature”2 suggests a universe constantly...
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