[In the following essay, originally published in 1966, Watson sees “Kubla Khan” as “a poem about poetry” and a premonition of Coleridge's subsequent critical statements concerning the transformative qualities of the imagination and his definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”]

Before he was twenty-six years old, and before the first edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared, Coleridge had made himself a poet of many languages: an apprentice in many styles, and already a master of some, as ‘The Ancient Mariner', ‘Christabel', and ‘Frost at Midnight’ all variously show. He was perhaps the first European poet to set himself the task of achieving a wide diversity of styles based upon models other than classical ones; the undertaking, after all, would have seemed barbarous nonsense to an Augustan, and unthinkable to a Renaissance poet. ‘Kubla Khan’ is … difficult … to interpret … but then by the late 1790s Coleridge might be said to have earned some right to be difficult. He was ready for ingenious solutions. Perhaps ingenuity is too pale a word to describe his poetic strength at this moment, at the height of his talent; but some of his solutions, like that in the ‘Mariner’ of giving a medieval dress to the most modern of themes, impress above all by their calculation and their temerity.

All this prepares for the confession that some aspects of ‘Kubla Khan’ remain inexplicable. The metre, for a start, is like nothing at all. The matter of dating might have proved crucial here, but unfortunately it remains inconclusive, and the traditional composition-date of May 1798 (Poetical Works, p. 295), which would leave the poem just later than the ‘Mariner’ and probably later than the beginning of ‘Christabel', has been challenged in favour of Coleridge's own date of 1797 and, less plausibly, in favour of 1799-1800. If the poem is later than any part of ‘Christabel', then its rhythm would represent a marked reaction back towards the heavy iambic beat of traditional English verse:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
          Down to a sunless sea …

(Poetical Works, p. 297)

The comparison with ‘Christabel’ is the more tempting since both poems are largely composed in four-footers; but it is impossible to explain, though easy to applaud, the strange compromise whereby ‘Kubla Khan’ moves in the most traditional of iambics from paragraph to paragraph in a rhyme-scheme that is always present, and yet neither stanzaic nor yet like an ode. The language of the poem is problematical too, given the bare facts that it is by Coleridge and of the 1790's. Unlike the ‘Mariner’ and ‘Christabel', it is in contemporary English, a fact which would pose no sort of puzzle for most poems in most ages, but which is very like a suspicious circumstance here. As a matter of fact, the suspicion is justified. Coleridge's source, to which he drew attention in the preface of 1816, on first publishing the poem side by side with ‘Christabel', is a source in Jacobean prose: not the richly convoluted Jacobean of Jeremy Taylor which he was to imitate in the prose gloss to the ‘Mariner', but the homespun Jacobean of Hakluyt's assistant Samuel Purchas. Coleridge obligingly quotes, or rather misquotes, the passage from Purchas's Pilgrimage (1613) in his preface to the poem. It actually reads:

In Xaindu did Cublai Can build a stately pallace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meddowes, pleasant springs, delightful streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure. …

(iv xi)

It is easy to imagine what Coleridge in another mood might have made of that. In fact he rejects from it everything that is beguilingly of its period—‘encompassing', ‘beasts of chase and game', ‘in the middest thereof.’ The poem is apparently modern. Much of it offers a kind of dynamic precision of language which is quite unlike the English of any age previous to Coleridge's:

… A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail.

If ‘Kubla Khan’ is a poem of the annus mirabilis of 1797-8, as still seems likely, and late rather than early in that year, then it is a striking inversion of Coleridgean formula. Instead of putting on the language of another, Coleridge has in this instance stripped it off. This is not to say that the language of the poem, or even of the first paragraph, is merely residual. It has too much life of its own for that. But its modernity is itself a device.

Such ingenuities ought to underline our uncertainty concerning the poet's purpose in ‘Kubla Khan.’ The fact is that almost everything is known about the poem except what it is about. Scholarship has been lavished upon the problem of dating. The very farmhouse in Culbone, a tiny village on the Somerset coast where the poet may have been interrupted in his composition, as he tells us in the 1816 preface, by ‘a person on business from Porlock', has been plausibly identified. The allegedly creative effects of opium-taking have been experimentally investigated and on the whole discredited. But an interpretation of the poem that is generally acceptable is no nearer than ever. Even Humphry House in his Clark Lectures, though he called it ‘a triumphant positive statement of the potentialities of poetry',¹ fumbled in his conclusion, narrowly missed the point of the poem, and failed to show how its logic works.

Taking heart from the medical evidence, which discounts the notion that opium produces either dreams in sleep or waking hallucinations, I shall dismiss one troublesome possibility at once. The Crewe manuscript of 1810, now in the British Museum, announces in Coleridge's own hand that the poem was ‘composed in a sort of reverie.’ By 1816, in the subtitle to the first printed version, the poem is rather bafflingly described as ‘A Vision in a Dream', and the preface claims it was composed in ‘a profound sleep’ of about three hours. Coleridge's own accounts, then, are something less than self-consistent; but even if they had been so, it would still be clear that ‘Kubla Khan’ is not in any formal sense a dream-poem, however it may have been composed. This is not to say that Coleridge's own accounts of how it came to be written are either mendacious or mistaken, though (after a lapse of a dozen years and more) it would not be surprising or disgraceful if they proved unreliable. It is simply that the poem is not a dream-poem in the technical sense, like Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, or Coleridge's own poems ‘The Pains of Sleep’ and ‘Phantom or Fact’; except in the single detail of the damsel with the dulcimer, that is, it does not purport to relate the experience of a dream. Whether it is ‘dreamlike’ is a matter of definition. For some unexplained reason, that word is commonly applied to the vague, shadowy or mystical, though dreams themselves hardly ever seem to be like this: Alice in Wonderland, which is none of these things, surely offers a much more convincing example of what they can be like. Few wide-awake readers will find Lowes's defence of Coleridge's 1816 preface convincing:

Nobody in his waking senses could have fabricated those amazing eighteen lines [from ‘A damsel with a dulcimer …’]. For if anything ever bore the infallible marks of authenticity, it is that dissolving panorama in which fugitive hints of Aloadine's Paradise succeed each other with the vivid incoherence, and the illusion of natural and expected sequence, and the sense of an identity that yet is not identity, which are the distinctive attributes of dreams.²

But it is not at all obvious that the poem is incoherent. In fact it is wonderfully of a piece. Peacock saw this point at once, in an article he drafted in 1818 in reply to the reviewers within two years of its publication. ‘There are very few specimens of lyrical poetry,’ he argued, ‘so plain, so consistent, so completely simplex et unum from first to last’ as ‘Kubla Khan’; and he dismisses the 1816 preface boldly:

as the story of its having been composed in his sleep must necessarily, by all who are acquainted with his manner of narrating matter of fact, be received with a certain degree of scepticism, its value of a psychological curiosity is nothing; and whatever value it has is in its poetic merit alone.³

In any case, Coleridge's own views about dreams seem to have been interpretative, more so than Lowes's phrase ‘dissolving panorama’ would suggest, and he may not have thought ‘Kubla Khan’ any the less significant or shapely for representing ‘a vision in a dream.’ Dreams, like poems, seem to have had for him ‘a logic of their own’:

Call it a moment's work (and such it seems)
This tale's a fragment from the life of dreams;
But say that years matur'd the silent strife,
And 'tis a record from the dream of life

(Poetical Works, p. 485)

Dreams have significance, like life itself, and demand interpretation. Certainly ‘Kubla Khan’ is a difficult poem, in the sense that it calls for careful exegesis based on a good deal of information about Coleridge's intellectual preoccupations. But it is not muddled. It may sound faint praise to some to call it one of the best organized of all Coleridge's works: more explicit, perhaps, to remark that it is one of those poems that seem all bones, so firm and self-assertive is the structure. It is not even, on the face of it (to continue the argument as if the troublesome preface did not exist), an emotionally intense poem, apart from the last half-dozen lines. Much of its tone is matter-of-fact, informative, even slightly technical, as if Coleridge was anxious, as he is in the opening section of the ‘Mariner', to get his measurements right. And it is worth noticing at once that he does get them right. The reader is enabled and encouraged to construct a model, or draw a map, of the Khan's whole device, and it can be no accident that the figure ‘five', mentioned in the sixth line, ‘So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round …’ is repeated in l.25: ‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion ….’ (This is corrected from ‘twice six miles’ in the Crewe manuscript.) The walls are ten miles long, in fact, in order to surround the five-mile stretch of the sacred river that is above the surface of the earth. Besides, as many have noticed, there seems to be nothing fragmentary about the poem as it survives, in spite of the 1816 subtitle ‘A Fragment’: it seems to say all it has to say. And the logical progression of the poem is unusually good, each of its four paragraphs being an advance upon its predecessor, and each one tightly organized within itself. All this is not to deny that Coleridge may have composed the poem in a dream, but only to insist that the dream-hypothesis is unhelpful, and even—in so far as it may encourage the reader to let down his guard and disregard what the poem is saying—something of a nuisance.

What is ‘Kubla Khan’ about? This is, or ought to be, an established fact of criticism: ‘Kubla Khan’ is a poem about poetry. It is probably the most original poem about poetry in English, and the first hint outside his notebooks and letters that a major critic lies hidden in the twenty-five-year-old Coleridge. Anyone who objects that there is not a word about poetry in it should be sent at once to the conclusion and asked, even if he has never read any Plato, what in English poetry this is like:

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

There are dozens of parallels in Renaissance English to this account of poetic inspiration, all based—though rarely at first hand—on Plato's view of poetic madness in the Ion or the Phaedrus. Shakespeare's banter about ‘the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling’ in A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the most famous. The ‘flashing eyes’ and ‘floating hair’ of Coleridge's poem belong to a poet in the fury of creation. Verbal resemblances to the text of Plato itself confirm that the last paragraph of the poem is a prolonged Platonic allusion. Socrates, in the Ion, compares lyric poets to ‘Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when under the influence of Dionysus’ and adds that poets ‘gather their strains from honied fountains out of the gardens and dells of the Muses. …’ Ion himself, describing the effects of poetic recitation, confesses that ‘when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end. …’ The very phrase ‘holy dread’ is Platonic (Laws 671D). That ‘Kubla Khan’ is in some sense a comment on Plato's theory of poetry is not really in doubt.

Given that ‘Kubla Khan’ is about poetry, its general direction is not difficult to discern, and real problems only arise in trying to account for detail after detail in terms of its total significance. The fifty-four lines of the poem divide clearly at line 36. The first section, often in coldly literal detail, describes the Khan's ‘rare device.’ Purchas's Pilgrimage (1613) tells us hardly more than that the Khan built a movable palace in a beautifully enclosed park. Coleridge is much more specific, and concentrates many of Purchas's details, and some others, into a closely consistent picture. The park in the poem is a mixture of the natural and the artificial, at once a wilderness and a garden, and what is man-made contains, or is contained in, the wild and uncontrollable:

And here were forests ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Though the whole design is of course artificial—an enclosed park centering upon a palace or ‘stately pleasure-dome'—it contains within itself, as its unique possession, something utterly natural and uncontrollable: the sacred river itself, for the rest of its course subterranean, bursts into the light at this point and flows violently above ground before sinking back. It is evidently for this reason that the tyrant chose the site for his palace, which stands so close to the water that it casts its shadow upon it and is within earshot of the sound of the river, both above and below ground. And these two sounds harmonize:

Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

With full emphasis upon the effect of harmonious contrast, the first section ends.

The second begins on an apparently irrelevant note, but its relevance is justified at once: the song of an Abyssinian girl, once heard in a dream, is capable of moving such ‘deep delight’ that

I would build that dome in air …

‘In air’ presumably means not substantially but as a poem, and the reader's first instinct is to say that this is just what Coleridge has done. But this is evidently wrong. The syntax makes it very clear that the project remains unfulfilled:

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry …

‘Kubla Khan', then, is not just about poetry: it is about two kinds of poem. One of them is there in the first thirty-six lines of the poem; and though the other is nowhere to be found, we are told what it would do to the reader and what it would do to the poet. The reader would be able to visualize a palace and park he had never seen; and the poet would behave after the classic manner of poets, like a madman. This second poem, a poem that does not exist, is so evidently the real thing that it is clear that the poem of the first thirty-six lines is not—not quite a poem at all, in Coleridge's terms. And if it is asked why Coleridge in 1798 would be likely to find ll.1-36 unpoetical, the question is already answered. They are factual, detailed, matter-of-fact. It is well known precisely why Coleridge objected to ‘matter-of-factness’ in poetry—the very word, in his view, was his own coinage. In the Biographia Literaria, written nearly twenty years later, he lists this quality as the second of Wordsworth's defects as a poet:

… a matter-of-factness in certain poems … a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects. …

(BL xxii)

This may sound rather remote from the twenty-five-year-old poet who wrote ‘Kubla Khan.’ But Hazlitt, if his evidence is to be trusted (and it may have been conditioned by a reading of this passage in the Biographia, which appeared in 1817), supplies the one detail to complete the case. In his essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets', published in the third number of The Liberal (April 1823) he tells how Coleridge had made the same objection to some of Wordsworth's poems in a walk near Nether Stowey in June 1798, only a few weeks after the most probable date of composition of ‘Kubla Khan.’ Coleridge, says Hazlitt:

lamented that Wordsworth was not prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place, and that there was something corporeal, a matter-of-fact-ness, a clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry in consequence … He said, however (if I remember right) that this objection must be confined to his descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the universe like a palace, and to discover truth by intuition rather than by deduction.

Here are two kinds of poetry, and evidence too that this preoccupation of Coleridge's career as a critic was already present in the fertile year of 1797-8. In a sense, it is the same question that led him, in the years that followed, into the period of intense critical activity that began with The Friend in 1809 and culminated in the composition of the Biographia Literaria in 1815. How far may poetry be purely informative and descriptive? Coleridge's answer, in effect, was ‘Ideally, never.’ Information is not the characteristic business of poetry. Poetry may have an informative effect, may leave us ‘sadder and wiser', as the Mariner's tale left the Wedding Guest. But it ought not to proceed, as some of Wordsworth's lesser poems do, by a mere aggregation of detail (‘Tis three feet long and two feet wide’). This, on its simplest and most practical level, is the force of Coleridge's imagination/fancy distinction, and there is evidence beyond Hazlitt, in Coleridge's own notebooks and letters, to show how early he hit upon it as a summary of his case for and against Wordsworth's poetry. An early letter of 15 January 1804, addressed to Richard Sharp, contains a full outline of the distinction:

Imagination, or the modifying power in that highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to fancy, or the aggregating power.

(CL, ii 1,034)

The interrupted discussion at the end of the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria, where the ‘essentially vital’ power of imagination is contrasted with the ‘fixities and definites’ of fancy, fills out the account of a dozen years earlier. But the letter of 1804 is precise enough, and early enough, to make it reasonable to suppose that the young poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ may already have been close to such a conclusion.

There are two aspects of the imagination-fancy distinction which, obvious as they are, tend perhaps to be overlooked. The first is that it is a value-distinction. ‘Imagination’ is the power that writes good poems: ‘fancy’ writes inferior ones. There is no such thing, in Coleridgean terms, as a bad imaginative poem. If the ‘shaping spirit’ really has shaped, if the poem is more than a sum of its parts and more than a mere aggregate of the poet's perceptions, then it is so far good. Secondly, the distinction is an historical one: it derives from a view of the whole past of English poetry. It is the decisive innovation of the romantic poet to write imaginative poems rather than fanciful ones, just as it was the characteristic role of the Augustans to condemn themselves to a poetry ‘addressed to the fancy or the intellect’ (BL i). Wordsworth, in this view, bestrides both worlds and is pathetically capable of both, and the Biographia is a belated plea inviting him to recognize both his excellence and his failings. But is just here, at this confident moment of exegesis, that an embarrassing choice emerges in the interpretation of ‘Kubla Khan.’ Given that it is a poem about two kinds of poetry, and that Coleridge's classic distinction may have been present to him, in essence at least, as early as 1798, there is no need to resist the conclusion that its first thirty-six lines are ‘fanciful’ and the remainder a programme for imaginative creation. But I do not know that there is any clear reason for assigning the fancifulness of the first section of the poem to what Coleridge disliked in the aristocratic poetry of the Augustan era, or to what he disliked in some of Wordsworth's, or to what he disliked in some of his own. The orientalism of the setting of the poem masks, and perhaps deliberately, its critical purpose.

Certainly the Khan is very like a tyrannical aristocrat as seen through romantic and liberal eyes. This is an aspect of the poem that might easily have seemed too obvious, in the years around 1800, to be worth mentioning, but it needs to be emphasized in an age which finds tyrants engagingly exotic, even to the point of supposing Kubla a model of the creative artist. The very fact that he is an oriental despot would have been reason enough in the late eighteenth century to excite hostility. To this day the French retain the word turquerie to describe a brutal act. Beckford's Vathek (1786) is one of the many oriental tales of the period, French and English, that hint at the exotic vices of eastern potentates. And there is nothing improbable about identifying eighteenth-century aristocratic failings with the medieval or modern East. Cowper vents an Englishman's indignation in the fifth book of The Task (1785) against Catherine the Great's ingenious Palace of Ice, a ‘most magnificent and mighty freak’ made without saw or hammer, a ‘brittle prodigy’:

                                                  a scene
Of evanescent glory, once a stream
And soon to slide into a stream again …
'Twas transient in its nature, as in show
'Twas durable: as worthless, as it seem'd
Intrinsically precious; to the foot
Treach'rous and false; it smil'd, and it was cold.
Great princes have great playthings …
But war's a game which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.

Keats in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ does not invoke the East to damn what he supposed the triviality of Augustan poetry; but the language he uses might be aptly used of the Khan. English poetry between the Elizabethans and the moderns he sees as a sterile interlude, ‘a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism’:

                              with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse
And thought it Pegasus.

The Khan, too, may be something of a barbarous fop. And if this seems a lofty and remote view of the East, it should be recalled that accurate orientalism is an extreme rarity in England before the Victorians; the orientalism of the early Romantics derives from experiences like the childhood reading of the Arabian Nights that Wordsworth refers to in the Prelude (v 482f.). It is colourful, picturesque, and indifferent to accuracy, at once fascinated and dismissive. Southey sums up the attitude that Coleridge is likely to have shared in his notes and preface to Thalaba (1801), a Moslem tale he began in 1799 in a new metre which was to be ‘The arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale.’ No labour, in Southey's view, could be justified in getting oriental details right. No faithful translation from the Persian could make Firdausi's epic readable, and the Arabian Nights, which had first appeared in English in about 1705-8, were all the better for having passed through ‘the filter of a French translation.’ ‘A waste of ornament and labour', as Southey puts it loftily, ‘characterizes all the works of the Orientalists.’ The East is not an object of study, but a place to let the imagination run riot in. And the chief excitement and source of horror lies in its despotism. Purchas offers rather an attractive picture of the Khan, as well as interesting details about his enormous, if fastidious, sexual appetite; but then Purchas was a Jacobean and took autocracy for granted, and was also impressed by the fact that this Emperor of the Tartars in the 1260's had treated his European guests well and taken a sympathetic interest in Christianity. The sentence from Purchas that Coleridge scribbled in his notebook emphasizes merely his despotism:

the greatest prince in peoples, cities, and kingdoms that ever was in the world.

(CN 1,840)

The overwhelmingly important fact about the ‘pleasure-dome’ of the poem, with its surrounding park, is its artificiality. It is a ‘miracle of rare device', despotically willed into existence as a tyrant's toy:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree … '

The authoritarian word ‘decree’ is not in Purchas, who simply says: ‘In Xaindu did Cublai Can build a stately pallace …’ And the painfully contrived quality of the tyrant's pleasure becomes clearer with every line: in the formal, though not entirely formal, gardens, and the trivial purpose to which the brute strength of the sacred river has been harnessed. The reader is meant to be left with a disagreeable image of the patron himself, congratulating himself on his facile ingenuity in degrading a matchless natural phenomenon to the service of a landscape garden—in itself a very Augustan pleasure—in order to flatter his own megalomaniac dreams:

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

In his artistic tastes, at least, he reminds one a little of the young Alexander Pope's complacent view of Windsor Park:

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,
Here earth and water seem to strive again;
Not Chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But, as the world, harmoniously confus'd.

Windsor-Forest (1713), ll. 11-14

‘In perusing French tragedies,’ Coleridge remarked years later, ‘I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness’ (BL i). Kubla's arrogance is much like this. If only he knew it, the poem hints, he has bitten off much more than he can chew.

For all the violence of great emotional experience survives there in the river, contained by the Khan's device much as Augustan poems seem to contain and even to sterilize the emotions of man: ‘thoughts translated into the language of poetry', as Coleridge later complained of Pope. The vast power of the river is allowed to rise, but only ‘momently', and then sinks back into silence, ‘a lifeless ocean.’ This is surely not the River of Life. It is the river of the poetry of imagination which, under the old literary order, had been debased into a plaything and allowed its liberty only if ‘girdled round.’ The passage that describes the river as it rushes above ground is dense with the imagery of the violent reshaping of dull matter, like the ‘essentially vital’ power of the imagination working upon objects ‘essentially fixed and dead’ (BL xiii):

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail …

The poem is profoundly elusive in other ways, but there is something uncharacteristically familiar about Coleridge's imagery here, so commonly are rivers and springs associated with poetry in classical and Renaissance poetry. The very name ‘Alph’ offers an easy clue in its resemblance to the Alpheus of Milton's ‘Lycidas', where it is associated with the Sicilian Muse of pastoral poetry. And the river of poetry was a preoccupation of some Romantics too. In his preface to the sonnets on The River Duddon (1820) Wordsworth was later to urge Coleridge to revive an old project of their Somerset year, a poem describing the course of a symbolic river to be called ‘The Brook’ (BL x). ‘There is a sympathy in streams', as he put it invitingly. The sacred river is the most traditional element in a poem otherwise evasive in its sophistication.

The triumph of ‘Kubla Khan', perhaps, lies in its evasions: it hints so delicately at critical truths while demonstrating them so boldly. The contrast between the two halves of the poem, between the terrible emergence of the imaginative power in the first, ‘momently forced', and its Dionysiac victory in the second, is bold enough to distract attention from the business at hand. So bold, indeed, that Coleridge for once was able to dispense with any language out of the past. It was his own poem, a manifesto. To read it now, with the hindsight of another age, is to feel premonitions of the critical achievement to come: phrases like ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings',⁴ or ‘the imagination … dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’ (BL xiii), lie only a little below the surface of the poem. But the poem is in advance, not just of these, but in all probability of any critical statement that survives. It may be that it stands close to the moment of discovery itself.

Notes

1. H. House, Coleridge (London, 1953) p. 116.

2. J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston, Mass., 1927; rev. ed. 1930) p. 363.

3. ‘An Essay on Fashionable Literature', Halliford edition of the Works of Peacock, edited by H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (London, 1934) viii 291, 290.

4. Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), an essay in some degree a work of collaboration between the two poets.