Kubla Khan: A Dream, or Something Greater

2220 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Kubla khan essay st coleridge

“A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.” Coleridge followed his own advice in the crafting of Kubla Khan; which presents his interpretation of the Kubla Khan court when under the influence of opiates. Due to the complexity of the poem, many have found that the poem lacks a true theme but instead focuses on “the nature and dialectical process of poetic creation.” Coleridge created a masterpiece by providing the readers room for personal interpretation but also a poem so well crafted that it illustrates the Romantic period as a whole.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of his family and was sent to Christ's Hospital School in London. He continued his studies at Cambridge University but left to join the army due to financial troubles. After being bailed out of the army by his friends, Coleridge returned to Cambridge. Coleridge befriended Robert Southey and they attempted to establish a community founded on their utopian philosophies about society. Unfortunately, this did not work out and Coleridge returned to settle down with Sara Fricker. Later, Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth collaborated on Lyrical Ballads in hopes of “revolutionizing the practice of contemporary poetry.” As Coleridge continued to publish his work, he became addicted to opium, taking it to relieve his neuralgic and rheumatic pains. This opium addiction led to one of his best pieces that would forever be analyzed- Kubla Khan.

After waking from a semi-conscious state, Coleridge rushed to write down the lines to Kubla Khan that he received when using opium. Unfortun...

... middle of paper ...

...f one of life's greatest mysteries – dreams.

Works Cited

"Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Introduction." Poetry Criticism. Ed. David Galens. Vol. 39. Gale Cengage, 2002. eNotes.com. 26 Feb, 2012

Karen Mahar: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": Creation of Genius or Addiction?. Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal. 2006. Volume 1 Number 1.

Stephen P Thornton.“Sigmund Freud 1856-1939.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 16 Apr. 2001.Web. 26 Feb. 2012.

A.S.M Shamim Miah. “Kubla Khan: A Poem of Sexual Ambiguity.” East West Journal of Humanities (2009): 1-13. Vol-1, No. 1, ISSN: 1998-1600. Web. 26 Mar. 2012

Hot Essays. Blogspot.com. 28 Mar. 2011. web. 26 Feb. 2012.

“Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2012

Show More
Related

  • Careful Manipulation in Coleridge's Kubla Khan

    1328 Words  | 3 Pages

    In his preface to "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes the claim that his poem is a virtual recording of something given to him in a drug-induced reverie, "if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things . . . without any sensation or consciousness of effort." As spontaneous and as much a product of the unconscious or dreaming world as the poem might seem on first reading, however, it is also a finely structured, well wrought device that suggests the careful manipulation by the conscious mind.

    Read More

  • Wordsworth's Emotions In The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

    497 Words  | 1 Pages

    Furthermore, Wordsworth’s assertion of feelings as the effects of an action or a situation, which means that actions should influence the emotions of the character and not the other way around, is dissimilar to The Raven’s character’s feeling of desperation in which he succumbed to his distress. However, the lesson derived from the bizarre workings of the human mind in preferring more devotion to the pain for the sake of “preserving the memory,” as “The Raven” illustrates, exposes to us how a particular person behaves towards grief. The statement thus proves in relation to Coleridge’s statement of the readers’ elicitation of the poem is more significant than the poem itself (in reference to his emphasis on the importance of the “Return”). Another variation between Wordsworth and Coleridge is that the former claims that the writer must bring the language near to the language of men, whilst the latter believes that the language of poetry should beautiful and elevated. “The Raven” in this case

    Read More

  • Kubla Kahn

    327 Words  | 1 Pages

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Kahn” is an example of imaginative poetry due to an opium addiction. This poem creates its own kingdom and paradise while Colridge expresses his ideas of Heaven and Hell through his own drug induced thoughts and opinions.

    Read More

  • Poem Explication: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

    1628 Words  | 4 Pages

    To fully understand this poem, the reader would find it helpful to know what led Coleridge to write it. Coleridge grew up with English essayist Charles Lamb in school and the two were close friends (Merriman.) In their later years, however, the two rarely saw each other as Coleridge lived in the country side and Lamb lived in the city, where he cared for his mentally ill sister (Merriman.) On one of the rare days Lamb went to visit him, Coleridge planed to go on a walk through the scenic area surrounding his house with Lamb and some other friends, but before they left, Coleridge’s wife accidentally dropped boiling milk on his foot and he was unable to participate in the walk (Benzon.) While the others gallivanted across the countryside, Coleridge sat in his garden and wrote this poem.

    Read More

  • William Wordsworth And Wordsworth's Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

    1848 Words  | 4 Pages

    Wordsworth is raised in a simple country side and he views his childhood as a time when his relationship with nature was at its greatest; he revisits his childhood memories to relieve his feelings and encourage his imagination. Even if he grew up within nature, he didn’t really appreciate it until he became an adult. He is pantheistic; belief that nature is divine, a God. Since he has religious aspect of nature, he believes that nature is everything and that it makes a person better. His tone in the poem is reproachful and more intense. His poem purpose is to tell the readers and his loved ones that if he feels some kind of way about nature, then we should have the same feeling toward it as well. On the other side, Coleridge is raised in rural city such as London  and expresses his idea that, as a child, he felt connected to nature when looking above the sky and seeing the stars. Unlike Wordsworth who felt freedom of mind, Coleridge felt locked up in the city. Since he did not have any experience with nature, he did not get the opportunity to appreciate nature until he became an adult. In Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight,” readers see how the pain of alienation from nature has toughened Coleridge’s hope that his child enjoy a peaceful nature. Instead of looking at the connection between childhood and nature as

    Read More

  • The Composition and Publication History of Samuel T. Coleridge's Kubla Khan

    2591 Words  | 6 Pages

    Although the exact date remains unknown, it is believed that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his poem Kubla Khan sometime in the fall of 1797 and began revisions of it in the early spring of 1798. Interestingly, although no original manuscript has been found, the Crewe Manuscript of Kubla Khan was discovered in 1934. Currently, the Crewe Manuscript is the earliest know version of Kubla Khan and is believed to have been written around 1810. After Lord Byron’s zealous response to Kubla Khan, Coleridge published the poem for the first time in May of 1816 under Byron’s publisher John Murray. While the poem was initially bound with two of his other poems: Christabel and Pains of Sleep, Kubla Khan was then published in 1828 within Coleridge’s collection Poetical Works. The final publication of Kubla Khan during Coleridge’s lifetime came in 1834, when a cumulative version of Poetical Works was introduced, which included some of Coleridge’s early, unpublished works.

    Read More

  • Samuel Coleridge's Kubla Khan and the Unconscious

    2487 Words  | 5 Pages

    Kubla Khan, however, is predominantly a mosaic of fragments of thoughts and incomplete themes. Most likely, the reader observes that poetic material perpetually escapes Coleridge’s full attention, while the poem simultaneously contains profound gushes of documented creativity. One is led to believe that this continual tension between recorded and unrecorded poetic thought creates the unique narrative sequence and the mysterious, disturbing quality that embodies Coleridge’s story of Kubla Khan.

    Read More

  • William Wordsworth and the Mortality of the Imagination

    895 Words  | 2 Pages

    Toynton, Evelyn. "A DELICIOUS TORMENT: The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge." Harper's. 01 Jun. 2007: 88. eLibrary. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

    Read More

  • Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    1155 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is believed that “Kubla Khan” was created by Coleridge when he was in a deep sleep that was induced by the use of opiates which were prescribed for dysentery. He fell asleep while reading Purcha’s Pilgrimage about building of Kubla Khan’s palace and garden. When he woke up from experiencing the dream in which he created the poem he began writing it down. He was part way through writing the poem and was interrupted by a person from the nearby town of Porlock. After this interruption he was unable to complete the poem because his access to the dream was lost. The unfinished work was not published for three decades. Much mystery has enshrouded “Kubla Khan” and it’s meaning due to the circumstances of it’s creation. The poem itself is as mystical and interesting as the story behind its creation.

    Read More

  • John Keats's Negative Capability Theory

    1425 Words  | 3 Pages

    Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature. Ninth Edition. Stephen Greenblatt, eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 459-462. Print.

    Read More

  • Kubla Khan and Ode on Grecian Urn

    826 Words  | 2 Pages

    Although both “Kubla Khan,” by Samuel Coleridge and “Ode on Grecian Urn,” by John Keats are poems originating from the poets’ inspiration from historical figure, the two poems convey different messages through their respective metaphors. While Coleridge emphasizes on the process of creating a Romantic poem, Keats expresses his opinion about art by carefully examining the details of the Grecian urn.

    Read More

  • Imagination in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner versus Kubla Khan

    968 Words  | 2 Pages

    In two works by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, both works regard the imagination as vitally important. In the Ancient Mariner, the imagination (or rather, the lack of it) condemns the Mariner to a kind of hell, with the fiends of sterility, solitude, and loneliness: “’God save thee, Ancient Mariner, from the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so?’ ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross’”. In Kubla Khan, the imagination of an external being, the narrator that Coleridge created, the ideal critic, can create a masterpiece that far outstrips the meager piece of work that even the emperor of a huge, rich civilization can produce: “I would build that dome in air, a sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware!” In Kubla Khan, the imagination can even make people fear an otherwise inconsequential event, sequence, or organism.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Pains of Sleep

    935 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout the beginning of the poem there are religious undertones Coleridge uses words like bended knee and reverential to highlight a religious belief and perhaps a plea to God to cure the “Pains of Sleep” this is interesting as he seems to feel “humbled” by the spirit presence. He mentions being weak but realises he is blest by this power. The religious undertone suggests to me a feeling of utter helplessness.

    Read More

  • The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner Analysis

    753 Words  | 2 Pages

    Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be interpreted in many different ways regarding the question of the relationship between the man and the nature. According to Geoffrey H. Hartman "Coleridge's poem traces the 'dim and perilous way' of a soul that has broken with nature and feels the burdenous guilt of selfhood" (48). Robert Penn Warren explains his perception and “the primary theme in this poem as the theme of sacramental vision, or the

    Read More

  • The Poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coloridge

    861 Words  | 2 Pages

    It is important to understand how the poem works to achieve these qualities, but also how the poem works to bring the reader back to reality. The powers and qualities of imagination are present in Kubla Khan and it is through Coleridge’s extraordinary writing that the reader is able to experience an imaginative world, in which we alternate between reality and imagination. Through alliteration and imagery, Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that become unfixed to the reader. Coleridge uses alliteration throughout the poem, in which the reader “hovers” between imagination and reality. As the reader moves through the poem, they feel as if they are traveling along a river, “five miles meandering in a mazy motion” (25).

    Read More

More about Kubla Khan: A Dream, or Something Greater

Open Document