Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Timothy Bahti (essay date 1981)
Timothy Bahti (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: Bahti, Timothy. “Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fragment of Romanticism.” Modern Language Notes 96, no. 5 (December 1981): 1035-50.
[In the following essay, Bahti evaluates “Kubla Khan” as it encapsulates the self-fragmenting quality of Romanticism.]
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, and...
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