Kubla Khan - Critical Response

Critical Response

According to some critics, the second stanza of the poem, forming a conclusion, was composed at a later date and was possibly disconnected from the original dream.

Before the poem was published, it was greatly favoured by Byron, who encouraged Coleridge to publish the poem, and it was admired by many people including Walter Scott. However, the immediate response to the 1816 collection was to ignore Christabel and Kubla Khan or to just attack Kubla Khan. The work went through multiple editions, but the poem, as with his others published in 1816 and 1817, had poor sales as a result of hostile critics who went so far to attack Coleridge's integrity. Many of the attacks started as a new generation of critical magazines, including Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Edinburgh Review, and Quarterly Review, were established at the beginning of the 19th century. The critics were more provocative than those of the previous generation, and much of the bad reception was based on Coleridge's timing of publication and his own political views, much of which contrasted with those of the critics, than actual content. Another reason for negative reviews was a puff piece written by Byron about the Christabel publication. Not all of the negative comments were public, as Charles Lamb, friend of Coleridge, expressed his fears of a negative response as he wrote: "Coleridge repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it; but there is an observation: 'never tell thy dreams,' and I am almost afraid that Kubla Khan is an owl that won't bear daylight. I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducing to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense."

The first of the negative reviews was written by William Hazlitt, literary critic and Romantic writer. He reviewed the collection of poems for the 2 June 1816 Examiner, and, in his analysis, he attacked the fragmentary nature of the work and argued, "The fault of Mr Coleridge is, that he comes to no conclusion ... from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing" and that the poem revealed that "Mr Coleridge can write better nonsense verse than any man in English." In conclusion, Hazlitt admitted, "We could repeat these lines to ourselves not the less often for not knowing the meaning of them." Following in the June 1816 Eclectic Review, Josiah Conder dismissed the poem: "As to 'Kubla Khan', and the 'Pains of Sleep', we can only regret the publication of them, as affording a proof that the Author over-rates the importance of his name. With regard to the former, which is professedly published as a psychological curiosity, it having been composed during sleep, there appears to us nothing in the quality of the lines to render this circumstance extraordinary." He then continued by focusing on the manner in which the poem was composed, 'We could have informed Mr. Coleridge of a reverend friend of ours, who actually wrote down two sermons on a passage in the Apocalypse, from the recollection of the spontaneous exercise of his faculties in sleep. To persons who are in the habit of poetical composition, a similar phenomenon would not be a stranger occurrence, than the spirited dialogues in prose which take place in dreams of persons of duller invention than our poet, and which not unfrequently leave behind a very vivid impression."

Coleridge's statements on the origin of the poem were considered again by various critics with an emphasis on how the origins affected the merits of the poem. In an anonymous review for the July 1816 Literary Panorama, the reviewer claimed, "'Kubla Khan' is merely a few stanzas which owe their origin to a circumstance by no means uncommon to persons of a poetical imagination ... It should however be recollected, that in sleep the judgment is the first faculty of the mind which ceases to act, therefore, the opinion of the sleeper respecting his performance is not to be trusted, even in his waking moments." The review does praise the work as it continues, "Still if Mr. Coleridge's two hundred lines were all of equal merit with the following which he has preserved, we are ready to admit that he has reason to be grieved at their loss." Another July 1816 anonymous review, for the Anti-Jacobin, discussed the origin of the poem but dismissed the poem with lukewarm praise: "These have none of the wildness or deformity, of 'Christabel'; and though they are not marked by any striking beauties, they are not wholly discreditable to the author's talents." Another July 1816 anonymous review, in the Augustan Review, claimed that the poem's descriptions "have much of the Oriental richness and harmony" but also said, in response to the preface, "There seems to be no great harm in dreaming while one sleeps; but an author really should not thus dream while he is awake, and writing too."

Reviews following months after publication contained limited positive appraisal of the poem. William Roberts's review, for the August 1816 British Review, was more positive than previous analysis but with no detail about the work: "passing over the two other poems which are bound together with 'Christabel', called 'The Fragment of Kubla Khan', and 'The Pains of Sleep'; in which, however, there are some playful thoughts and fanciful imagery, which we would gladly have extracted if our room would have allowed it." The next review came in the January 1817 Monthly Review, with the anonymous reviewer questioning: "Allowing every possible accuracy to the statement of Mr. Coleridge, we would yet ask him whether this extraordinary fragment was not rather the effect of rapid and instant composition after he was awake, than of memory immediately recording that which he dreamt when asleep? By what process of consciousness could he distinguish between such composition and such reminiscence? Impressed as his mind was with his interesting dream, and habituated as he is ... to the momentary production of verse, will he venture to assert that he did not compose, and that he did remember, the lines before us?" The review then concluded, "His 'psychological curiosity', as he terms it, depends in no slight degree on the establishment of the previous fact which we have mentioned: but the poem itself is below criticism. We would dismiss it with some portentous words of Sir Kenelm Digby, in his observations on Browne's religio Medici: 'I have much ado to believe what he speaketh confidently; that he is more beholding to Morpheus for learned and rational as well as pleasing dreams, than to Mercury for smart and facetious conceptions'."