The Fickleness of Dreams, Brilliance of Samuel T. Coleridge

543 Words2 Pages

Samuel T. Coleridge was a brilliant though often erratic writer. Many of his greatest works were written while he was “chasing the dragon” (as opium addiction was known at the time.) Nonetheless he was a brilliant poet and his usage of particularly vivid imagery was inspired.

One of Coleridge's seminal works from that period of his life was a short poem entitled “Kubla Khan” or “a Vision in a Dream”. According to Coleridge, this is but a fragment of the whole... He had envisioned an epic work of some two to three hundred lines of poetry whilst sleeping and upon waking, immediately tried to transcribe his dream to paper. He had written the first three stanzas when he was interrupted by the so-called “Person from Porlock” (wiki) who detained him for over an hour and subsequently was unable to recall the rest of the poem. Is that story true? Or is it rather; as many have asserted, simply an excuse used by Coleridge in an attempt to appease the critics of the time. Many of whom, it should be noted, dismissed the poem as literary nonsense. In fact, one of Coleridge's contempor...

Open Document