SOURCE: “The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan On Coleridge's Introductory Note” in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam's Dream, edited by J. Robert Barth and John L. Mahoney, University of Missouri Press, 1990, pp. 97-108.

[In the following essay, Perkins discusses the importance of the introductory note to “Kubla Khan,” noting that it guides the reader's interpretation of the work from start to finish.]

Coleridge's introductory note to Kubla Khan weaves together two myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and then dispelled irrecoverably. The nonexistent lines haunt the imagination more than any actual poem could. John Livingston Lowes used to tell his classes, W. Jackson Bate remembers, “If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on business from Porlock.” He has become, as Elizabeth Schneider remarks, a byword for Philistine intrusion upon genius. Coleridge's self-portrait in the introductory note is another source of fascination, one that anticipates, as Timothy Bahti observes, the image of the poet later propagated by the symbolistes and L'art pour l'art.¹ The note describes the poet as a solitary, a dreamer, and a reader of curious lore, such as Purchas His Pilgrimage. He is not portrayed as a habitual taker of drugs but rather the opposite: an “anodyne” had been prescribed for an illness and had the profound effect the note describes because, as the reader is supposed to infer, Coleridge was not used to the drug. But the motif of being drugged is also part of the symboliste myth of the poet. Only to a poet of this kind, withdrawn in dreams and uncertain in his inspiration, could the person from Porlock be a serious intrusion. That the man from Porlock comes “on business” is also typical of the symboliste ethos, in which ordinary life and “business” were viewed as antithetical to poetry.

How the introductory note should be printed has not been much discussed, but editors have disagreed in practice. In popular anthologies it may be omitted altogether. If it is, the poem may not be read with the assumption that it is unfinished, particularly when, as is generally done, the editor also deletes Coleridge's 1834 subtitle, “Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”² Since in Romantic poetry “Vision,” “Dream,” and “Fragment” are practically genres, a reader's experience of the poem must be quite different when the expectations evoked by these terms are not activated.

In many anthologies Coleridge's introduction is printed as a footnote, usually without the first paragraph and the conclusion (the note usually stops at “without the after restoration of the latter,” deleting the self-quotation from The Picture and the paragraphs that follow it). This editorial decision gives the introductory note less importance and suppresses several of its themes: that Coleridge is reluctant to publish the poem, that he offers it only as a “psychological curiosity,” and that he is dependent on involuntary inspiration. After the poem was first “given” to him and then lost, he says in the penultimate paragraph, he could not restore or finish it “for himself,” though he frequently tried. When Coleridge's lines from The Picture are not included, the theme of lost inspiration loses one of its counterpointing developments.

Or editors may place the note before the poem as an introduction, as Coleridge did. My purpose in this essay is to inquire what difference it makes. The introductory note guides our reading of the poem from start to finish. Without it, most readers would interpret the poem as asserting the power and potential sublimity of the poet, who can be compared to the great Khan. With the introductory note, this assertion is still present, but it is strongly undercut; the poem becomes richer and more complex, and the theme of lost inspiration is much more heavily weighted. Since many critics have stressed that the introductory note apologizes for the poem and minimizes its significance, there is no need to dwell further on these points. Instead, I shall emphasize that the introductory note gives the poem a plot it would not otherwise have, indicates genres to which the poem belongs, and presents images and themes that interrelate with those in the poem.

In previous articles and books, the only critics who have discussed the problems I take up are Irene H. Chayes, Kathleen M. Wheeler, and Jean-Pierre Mileur.³ For Chayes, the introductory note is a “literary invention” that “serves as an improvised argument” of the poem; it informs the reader that “the unacknowledged point of view” in the first thirty-six lines of the poem “is that of a man asleep, probably dreaming”; and it offers a “general structural parallel” to the poem, since in both the introductory note and the poem “poetic composition of one kind occurs in the past but in some way is imperfect, and poetic composition of another kind is planned for the future but remains unachieved” (pp. 2-4). Wheeler agrees with Chayes that the introductory note is “a highly literary piece of composition” and that it has thematic similarities to the last eighteen lines of the poem. She thinks that the speaker of the introductory note is not to be taken as Coleridge but as a literal-minded and naive persona whom Coleridge creates “as a model to the reader of how not to respond to the poem” (p. 28). Once the reader recognizes himself in the persona, Wheeler argues, he feels a revulsion and becomes more imaginative and perceptive. Since Coleridge intended all this, his ironic representation of himself in the persona as a “laughingstock” was “a gesture of incalculable generosity” (p. 38). She arrives at this theory because she wants to make the introductory note analogous to the glosses of the Ancient Mariner.⁴ Mileur also believes that the introductory note is a “self-conscious fiction” with literary quality. It “constitutes an interpretation of the poem” and itself “cries out for interpretation” (p. 26). He makes specific suggestions to which I am indebted, but his interest is less in the relation of the introductory note to the poem than in general issues this relation poses or illustrates—“immanence” and “presence” versus “revision” and “belatedness.”

Complex parallels and contrasts link the introductory note and the poem. There is a sharp difference in scene and tone. The introductory note is realistic, everyday, faintly humorous, and prose, while the poem is romantic, exotic, sublime, and verse. The action of the one is located in contemporary England, between Porlock and Linton, while the other is in ancient China. But they have a similar theme: the character and power (or weakness) of the poet. In the introductory note the poet is a drugged dreamer; his momentary inspiration is dismissed as a psychological anomaly. He takes “pen, ink, and paper” to record his lines, and his poem dissolves when the ordinary world intrudes. In the concluding lines of the poem, however, the poet is an awful figure of supernatural inspiration. His poetry is voiced, spoken rather than written, and imposes itself on the ordinary world, for in the conclusion of the poem the man from Porlock is represented by the poet's auditors (“all”), who are compelled to hear the poet and see his vision. Nevertheless, both the poet of the introductory note and the one of the concluding lines of the poem have lost their inspiration; the difference between them is that the modest, rueful writer of the introductory note scarcely hopes to recover it, while the speaker of the poem imagines himself as possibly doing so and creates a sublime image of himself as poet. We might be tempted to say that the introductory note and the concluding paragraph ironize one another, so that in neither can the representation of the poet's character and relation to the world be read with naive faith.⁵ But when brought into contact with Romantic conventions, whatever is expressed in realistic conventions, as is the introductory note, always preempts our sense of truth. Everything about the introductory note—its tone, its description of the poet, the world it portrays—emphasizes by contrast that the poem is Romantic in the sense of unreal.

In his “lonely farm-house” the author of the introductory note may also be compared with Kubla Khan behind his walls; since no other persons are mentioned in the first thirty-six lines of the poem, the reader imagines Kubla as alone. Though it is not unconscious and inspired,⁶ Kubla's creativity is similarly effortless; he decrees and the palace is built. Coleridge's reference in the introductory note to “images on the surface of the stream” has reminded some readers of lines 31-32;⁷ in these lines the image or “shadow” of the dome of pleasure would similarly be in fragments, since it would be broken by the waves,⁸ as also is the image reflected on the stream in The Picture. The word anodyne sounds a little like “Xanadu,” suggesting that Kubla's palace is located in opium-land.

This brings me to the very interesting quotation in the introductory note from Coleridge's The Picture. The introductory note implies that a stone has been thrown into a stream. A youth, who is gazing into the stream, can no longer see the images reflected in it, since they are dispersed by the waves from the stone. The youth is a version of the poet in the introductory note. If we read only the extract from The Picture that Coleridge quotes, we cannot known what “lovely forms” are reflected in the stream. In the context of the whole episode in The Picture, they are the forms of natural objects along the bank and of a “stately virgin,” who has coyly obliterated the reflection of herself, at which the youth was gazing, by dropping not a stone but blossoms into the stream. Coleridge's theme in this part of The Picture is the familiar Romantic one of nympholepsy as expressing attraction to the transcendent and ideal. Like the persons in the concluding paragraph of the poem, who would close their eyes “with holy dread” at sight of the supernaturally inspired poet, the youth hardly dares to look at the maiden directly (“scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes”). His vision of her is lost (“all that phantom-world so fair / Vanishes”), and just as Kubla hears “Ancestral voices prophesying war,” the “fair” vision seen by the youth becomes one of strife, as each of the “thousand circlets” created by the blossoms falling into the water “mis-shape[s] the other.” But the extract from The Picture has a happier trajectory than the introductory note. For in the extract there is a second person, the poet speaker, who is watching or imagining this scene. He comforts the disconsolate youth by reassuring him that the visions will be restored, and in the lines Coleridge quotes they “Come trembling back,” and the pool is again “a mirror.” Reading only the fragment quoted in the introductory note, we would not know that this episode in The Picture actually ends with the loss of the vision. In the lines not quoted, the “shadow” of the maiden can no longer be seen after the stream has again smoothed over. She has departed, and thereafter the youth seeks her through the woods in vain, or gazes into “the vacant brook.”

Whether the story Coleridge tells in the introductory note is true has been much debated but makes no difference to my argument. Most critics now doubt that the poem was interrupted by the man from Porlock, that it is a fragment, and that its composition was as involuntary as the introductory note suggests.⁹ (On the Crewe manuscript Coleridge noted that it was “composed, in a sort of Reverie.”) However, the state of the argument leaves one free to credit or question Coleridge's story at any of these points, and the main reason for denying that Kubla Khan is a fragment is the possibility of interpreting it as a coherent whole. If Coleridge's story is not true—or even if it is—one naturally asks why he told it. The usual answer is that Coleridge was embarrassed by the poem. He had “little confidence” in it (McFarland), wished to defend himself against the charge of obscurity (Yarlott), and was ashamed to publish another fragment (Schneider).¹⁰ He wrote the introductory note to deflect judgment, for we cannot form a critical opinion of a fragment, or if we can, we cannot hold Coleridge responsible for a poem composed in a dream. Beer, Bate, Brisman, Patterson, and others argue that the meaning of the poem made Coleridge uneasy; hence in the introductory note he both abdicated responsibility for the poem and tried to minimize its significance.¹¹ I shall come back to this point later, but for the moment I shall assume that Coleridge wrote the introductory note for reasons quite different from those that have been suggested. He wished to impose a “plot” upon the poem and to invoke appropriate formal expectations.

Without the introductory note Kubla Khan would not have a plot but would consist of two separate passages, the second referring in some lines to the first but not continuing from it. Bate has argued that this structure corresponds to a common one in the greater Romantic lyric, in which the first part, the “odal hymn,” postulates a “challenge, ideal, or prototype that the poet hopes to reach or transcend,” and the “second part, proceeding from that challenge, consists of” a concluding “credo,” a “personal expression of hope or ambition.”¹² Bate cites Keats's Ode to Psyche and Shelley's Ode to the West Wind as examples. In these examples, however, the two parts are much more closely interconnected than in Kubla Khan, and Coleridge was strongly committed to the principle that a good poem is organically unified. He could hardly have been pleased with the structure he had created. By writing the introductory note he both explained the structure and converted the poem into the dramatic enactment of a story.

The story told in the introductory note and enacted in the poem is that Coleridge, having taken an “anodyne,” fell asleep while reading Purchas His Pilgrimage. In his sleep he composed “from two to three hundred lines.” He remembered them when he awoke, and wrote them down as far as line 30. At this point a person called on business from Porlock and stayed above an hour. When, thereafter, Coleridge tried to continue the poem, he found that “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images,” he could no longer remember it. He wrote down the “scattered lines and images,” which make up lines 31-36 of the poem, and at some later time composed lines 37-54 as a conclusion. Since the introductory note does not explicitly say that Coleridge appended the “scattered lines” to the ones already set down, a reader could assume that the interruption to the poem, caused by the man from Porlock, comes at line 36. I prefer to locate it at line 31 (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure”) because at that point the continuity breaks and because the poem again seems somewhat discontinuous at line 35 (“It was a miracle of rare device”); thus, to repeat, lines 31-34 and 35-36 can plausibly be viewed as the separate fragments Coleridge could still remember after the visitor from Porlock had left. Wherever the reader locates the interruption, he sees it taking place, but would not see it without the introductory note, which tells him to look for it. Kubla Khan is a poem on the Romantic theme of lost inspiration that represents the loss occurring.¹³

That the final lines (37-54) are not to be read as among those given in the dream is a necessary inference from their content.¹⁴ For otherwise a reader would have to assume that in the very moment when Coleridge was envisioning the Abyssinian maid (“the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the corresponding expressions”) he spoke of this vision in the past tense. Such deliberate confusions are expected in John Ashbery but impossible to imagine in earlier poets. The poet would hardly say “In a vision once I saw” while the vision was present to him. Neither would he desire to revive the vision in the midst of it. Hence the reader must assume that lines 37-54 were written at some time subsequent to the dream composition. The longer we suppose they came after the original experience, the more moving their nostalgia and wish, as we imagine Coleridge still remembering the vision and longing to “rebuild” it. Yet, though the final lines are in the subjunctive mood, the grammatical markers of this (“could,” “would,” “should”) disappear after line 49. The reader half forgets that the lines express only a wish and glories in the sublime poet they describe as though he were present. Thus, though in logic and grammar the poem does not conclude positively, for the imagination it ends triumphantly, as though the dome were rebuilt. In this respect the conclusion develops a possibility given in a different tone in the introductory note through Coleridge's self-quotation from The Picture, which had promised that the “visions will return” and the “fragments … unite.”

The Abyssinian maid has been the focus of intensive commentary; while nothing in the introductory note, so far as I can see, explains why Coleridge referred to her in particular, the plot to this point makes it plausible that at line 37 the speaker would appeal to some external source of inspiration. For his poem has been interrupted, the vision it reports is lost, and he is unable to revive the vision “for himself.” From his store of memory or imagination, therefore, he invokes the Abyssinian maid as a muse. When in line 38 he says that he once saw the Abyssinian maid in “a vision,” he refers to a different vision from that reported in lines 1-36 and referred to in the introductory note (“he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision”) and in the subtitle, for though a reader might imagine that the vision of the Abyssinian maid was included in the dream, the different associations of Abyssinia and China, Kubla Khan and a singing maiden, suggest otherwise. The formulation of line 38 suggests this also, for if “a vision” referred to the vision just narrated of Kubla Khan's pleasure grounds and dome, it would more appropriately read “the vision,” and the word once would not be present.¹⁵ To sum up: the introductory note says that the poet lost a vision and the final lines express a wish to rebuild this vision, but in order to rebuild the vision of Kubla's pleasure dome, the poet must first revive a different vision, seen on another occasion, of an Abyssinian maid.

Because of the introductory note, we read Kubla Khan as a dream-poem, a genre that appealed strongly in the Romantic period. Among the well-known dream-poems are The Prelude 5.70-140, The Pains of Sleep, Darkness, The Four Zoas, and The Fall of Hyperion; if we conflate “dream” with “vision” we would add many more, including The Triumph of Life and virtually all of Blake.

To say just what readers expected in poems in this genre would be a subject for a book, and I can touch only on some main headings. A dream-poem might be “nonsense” (Lamb's and Hazlitt's term for Kubla Khan). But it might be veiled revelation, especially when it was also a “vision.” Dreams and visions escaped from realism, predesigned form, orderly sequence, and rational and ethical responsibility and were thus invested with the mystery and wonder also found in primitive myths, folk and fairy tales, and medieval romances. Dreams might embody our secret emotions, and for some Romantic readers dreams might emerge from a reality deeper than ordinary reality, or express a mind within us that is more profound and aware than the conscious mind; dreams might rise from our inmost being where we are one with the all. If, as several commentators assume, Coleridge wished in the introductory note to minimize the import of Kubla Khan, to describe it as a dream was not an effective method.

Among the formal characteristics of dreams, and hence of dream-poems, was their concreteness. Except when a character in the dream spoke, a dream was made up of images, and a dream-poem lacked discursive language. The images might be peculiarly vivid. This was prized, and the more so when the images were glamorous or exotic. The poetic effusion of Perdita Robinson on Kubla Khan suggests that she found no meaning in the images but was thrilled by them and that they set off similar, supplementary images in her mind. The sequence of dream imagery might be explained by laws of association; moreover, in dreaming such functions of the mind as the external senses, the reason, or the will might be suspended, making dreams more purely associational than the activity of the mind when awake. Or, in another theory, the imagery of dreams was not produced by association but expressed and varied with the emotional state of the dreamer. According to G. H. von Schubert's Symbolik des Traumes (1814), the images of a dream are metaphorical and symbolic; they achieve a rapidity, economy, and wealth of meaning impossible to words. A few strangely ordered images in a dream can express what it would take hours to say in verbal language.¹⁶ But the images of a dream are not experienced as figurative by the dreamer. For as Coleridge explained in connection with stage illusion, a dreamer does not compare the images presented in the dream with others. Each is literal reality during the instant in which it is present. Obviously the persistently concrete, exotic, immediate, unexplained imagery of Kubla Khan would seem dreamlike to a Romantic reader.

In other dream-poems the speaker remembers a dream and reports it; since it took place in the past, the dream, we assume, has been worked over by the poet with the intention of creating a poem. In Kubla Khan, according to the introductory note, the words of the poem were part of the dream and were not changed subsequently. That composition was involuntary would have meant to Coleridge that Kubla Khan could not be considered a poem in the full sense and would have justified his description of it as a mere “psychological curiosity.” But for many Romantic readers Coleridge's introductory note would have suggested that Kubla Khan, as the work of the “poet hidden” within us, in Schubert's phrase, was a greater work than if the conscious mind and will had helped to create it.

What Coleridge conveyed to the reader in calling the poem a “fragment” is more doubtful. It was not, in any case, merely that the poem was incomplete. Of course, Coleridge thus made, as I said, loss of inspiration more emphatically the subject of the poem than it would otherwise have been, and he altered the image of the poet, who became less sublime and more pathetic. But at least in German Romanticism, with which Coleridge was familiar, a “fragment” was a recognized literary from.¹⁷ It was valued because it activated the imagination; in fact, a fragment was more suggestive than the same words would be within a larger work, where the context would necessarily limit their implication. According to the theories of the Schlegel brothers, a fragment preserves the free, ironic stance of its author as a systematic work would not. And for Romantic feeling in general, as McFarland has shown, any existing particular must seem a fragment in relation to the infinite whole. In McFarland's Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin attention is also directed to fragmentation within what we naively consider as wholes. For the Romantic sense of things, as McFarland interprets it, poems, personalities, and lives are inevitably “diasparactive” or torn apart.

The theme of fragmentation runs through Kubla Khan. There is the subtitle, and the term fragment occurs again in the introductory note; the two to three hundred lines of which the poem originally consisted may or may not have been a fragment; after the person from Porlock has gone, Coleridge can recall only “scattered lines or images”; he quotes (misquotes) a fragment from Purchas His Pilgrimage and another from his own poem The Picture; in the latter quotation the images in the water are said to shatter into “fragments” and then reunite; in the poem “huge fragments” of rocks are hurled up by a “fountain”; the “shadow of the dome of pleasure” would be broken into fragments by “the waves”; and structurally the poem falls into at least two separate fragments. A fragment, as these items suggest, is torn from something larger, and it brings the larger context to mind. Just as the whole of Purchas His Pilgrimage is vaguely invoked by the extract from it, and the entire The Picture by the quotation from it, the original “two to three hundred lines” of Kubla Khan are shadowed forth by the lines we have, not as something we can read or even guess at, but as something we are tempted to guess at. Moreover, a fragment, as the “huge rocks” remind us, can be sublime in itself. Many of these references are to actions and describe things becoming fragmented, fragments being hurled forth, and fragments reuniting. Things become fragmented by accident, as in the introductory note, or deliberately, as in The Picture, or by the action of irresistible forces and pressures, as with the huge rocks. The two latter suggestions, I suspect, are closer than the introductory note to the truth concerning Coleridge's fragment.

Lowes, who gives a source for almost every image in the poem, did not seek one for the man from Porlock, for he did not consider this famous person as a part of the poem but as real. If, taking the opposite point of view, we ask why the man from Porlock came, answers may be: to reestablish everyday, rational consciousness, to end the solitude of the poet and associate him again with ordinary human beings, to turn the poem into a fragment, and to stop a transgression. When Coleridge's mind was “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (to use Wordsworth's great metaphor for the mind of Sir Isaac Newton), his speculations, emotions, and mental imagery might become deeply disturbing to him. The person from Porlock serves the same function in the plot as the mildly reproving glance darted from the eye of Sara in line 49 of The Eolian Harp; her glance causes the poet to retract the “dim and unhallowd” speculations he has just been pursuing—“shapings of the unregenerate mind”—and to reestablish solidarity with ordinary, good people, “the family of Christ.” The person from Porlock is also somewhat analogous to the “goodly company” with which the Ancient Mariner, at the end of the poem, would wish to walk to church, and he has affinities with the friend, in chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria, who has read Coleridge's chapter on the imagination and advises him not to publish it.¹⁸ Many critics have suggested what transgression was imminent in the poem. It had to do with the vision of poetry and the poet as rivaling the creative power of God and/or of the demonic.

THE INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in “Purchas's Pilgrimage”: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

                                                                      Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape[s] the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes—
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

[The Picture; or, the Lover's Resolution, lines 91-100]

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Σαμερυν αδιυν αsω: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease [“The Pains of Sleep”].

Notes

1. Timothy Bahti, “Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fragment of Romanticism,” Modern Language Notes 96:5 (December 1981): 1037.

2. In the earlier printings of 1816, 1828, and 1829 the subtitle was “Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream,” and the introductory note was entitled “Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan.”

3. Irene H. Chayes, “‘Kubla Khan’ and the Creative Process,” Studies in Romanticism 6:1 (Autumn 1966): 1-4; Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 17-41; Jean-Pierre Mileur, Vision and Revision: Coleridge's Art of Immanence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24-33, 80-88.

4. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 66, and Warren Stevenson, Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creative Motif in Blake and Coleridge (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1972) also compare the introductory note with the gloss to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

5. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 24, also notes that the introductory note and the poem each challenge “the other's literality.”

6. Though there was a legend, which Coleridge probably knew, that Kubla Khan had envisioned his summer palace in a dream before he built it. See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), 358.

7. Bahti, “Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan,’” 1046; Mileur, Vision and Revision, 31; and other commentators.

8. This point was suggested to me in conversation by Judson Watson.

9. Some opinions may be cited without giving complete references: Lowes, Abrams, Hanson, Shaffer, and Piper accept that the poem was produced much as the introductory note says; Schneider, Ober, Watson, Mackenzie, and Stevenson doubt that its composition was involuntary. Schneider thinks it is a fragment; House, Bate, Beer, Bloom, and McFarland deny this.

10. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 225; Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid (London: Methuen, 1967), 128; Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 27.

11. John Beer, “Coleridge and Poetry: I. Poems of the Supernatural,” in S. T. Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1971), 66-69; Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 82-84; Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 26-28; Charles I. Patterson, “The Daemonic in Kubla Khan: Toward Interpretation,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 89 (1974): 1039.

12. Bate, Coleridge, 78.

13. Donald Pierce, “‘Kubla Khan’ in Context,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 21:4 (Autumn 1981): 581, points out that Kubla Khan is “a poem about suspended powers. The unfinishedness of ‘Kubla Khan’ is integral to the theme.”

14. Most persons who have written about the poem seem to assume this, but I have found in conversation that many Coleridgeans do not. Hence I make the point explicitly.

15. David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1979), 92, points out that “the ‘once I saw’ (l. 38) seems to invoke a time outside of and prior to the vision of Xanadu.”

16. G. H. von Schubert, Symbolik des Traumes, 3d ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1840), 6. Drawing his notions of the formal characteristics of dreams and dream poems from Freud, John Beer remarks that the poem “has the arbitrariness and reductive economy of much dream work” and “provides a many-faceted example of the ‘over-determination’ that Freud traced in much dream-work” (“The languages of Kubla Khan,” in Coleridge's Imagination, ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 220, 252). Since I do not know whether or not the poem was actually a dream, but do know that Coleridge wanted it to be read as a dream, I do not compare it with Freudian descriptions of dream form but with the ideas of Coleridge and his contemporaries on this subject.

17. Chayes, “‘Kubla Khan’ and the Creative Process,” 2, remarks, “Among the Romantics, ‘fragment’ sometimes has almost generic meaning.”

18. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 14, connects the introductory note with chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria; see also Brisman, Romantic Origins, 34.