Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Timothy Bahti (essay date 1981)
Timothy Bahti (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: “Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and the Fragment of Romanticism,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 96, No. 5, December, 1981, pp. 1035-50.
[In the following essay, Bahti examines the language and structure of “Kubla Khan” and notes that it is both a fragment and a whole.]
I wrote reflections that, in many ways, were even stronger than their origin.
—Derek Walcott
[Der] negative Sinn … entsteht, wenn einer bloß den Geist hat, ohne den Buchstaben; oder umgekehrt. …
—Friedrich Schlegel1
When Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” appeared in 1816, the contemporary reviewers spoke of the poem's “nonsense.” This “nonsense” was immediately related to the ostensibly partial character of the poem: it was not wholly a meaningful poem, but only meaningless music; or else, Coleridge had dared too much,...
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