Poetry Criticism | Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Augustan Review (review date 1816)

Augustan Review (review date 1816)

SOURCE: Review of Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson, p. 226. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970.

[In the following excerpt orginally published in the Augustan Review in 1816, the unsigned reviewer remarks on Coleridge's ostensible dream composition of “Kubla Khan” and decries the lack of poetic merit in this “psychological curiosity.”]

It is said of Milton, that often when he awoke from a night's repose, he would write down to the amount of twenty or thirty verses, inspired during the night. But, this, it seems, is nothing to the liberality of Mr. Coleridge's muse, who, in the short space of three hours, brought, not a train of poetical ideas, to be afterwards embodied in appropriate verse, but a corps of well-appointed able-bodied lines, ready, without further...

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