Kubla Khan - Theories About The Preface and The Writing of The Poem

Theories About The Preface and The Writing of The Poem

The Preface of Kubla Khan began by explaining that it was printed: "at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, 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". The preface then provided an origin to both the poem and why it was merely a smaller portion of an intended larger work. After reading from Purchas's book, "The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines ... 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." The image of himself that Coleridge provides is of a dreamer who reads works of lore and not as an opium addict. Instead, the effects of the opium, as described, are intended to suggest that he was not used to its effects.

There are some problems with Coleridge's account, especially the claim to have a copy of Purchas with him. It was a rare book, unlikely to be at a "lonely farmhouse", nor would an individual carry it on a journey; the folio was heavy and almost 1000 pages in size. It is possible that the words of Purchas were merely remembered by Coleridge and that the depiction of immediately reading the work before falling asleep was to suggest that the subject came to him accidentally.

The passage continues with a famous account of an interruption: "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 purpose 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!" The actual person from Porlock mentioned could be many people, including Wordsworth, Joseph Cottle, John Thelwall, Coleridge's wife, or merely a literary device. As a symbol within the preface, the person represents the obligations of the real world crashing down upon the creative world or other factors that kept Coleridge from finishing his poetry. The claim to produce poetry after dreaming of it became popular after Kubla Khan was published. The person from Porlock later became a word to describe interrupted genius, and the literary critic Walter Jackson Bate recounted that while John Livingston Lowes taught the poem, he told his students "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." The literary critic D. F. Rauber claimed that the man was "necessary to create the illusion of the cut short rather than the stopped". This would have allowed Coleridge to purposefully write the poem as a fragment.

The Preface to the poem suggests that the poem was not supposed to be printed, that it was a fragmentary work that he was unable to complete, and that the work itself was provided to him through involuntary inspiration. When the Preface is dropped, the poem seems to compare the act of poetry with the might of Kubla Khan instead of the loss of inspiration causing the work to have a more complex depiction of the poetic power. Taken together, the Preface could connect with the first half of the poem to suggest that the poem is from the view of a dreaming narrator, or it could connect with the second half of the poem to show how a reader is to interpret the lines by connecting himself with the persona in a negative manner. The Preface and the poem are different in their locations, as the Preface discusses Coleridge's England while the poem discusses ancient China, but both discuss the role of the poem and his abilities. The poet of the Preface is a dreamer who must write and the poet of the poem is a vocal individual, but both are poets who lose inspiration. Only the poet of the poem feels that he can recover the vision, and the Preface, like a Coleridge poem that is quoted in it, The Picture, states that visions are unrecoverable.