Coleridge and Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is presented as a major Romantic poet whose poetry draws on dreams and the irrational mind. The account of Kubla Khan's origin is described as legendary: after falling asleep while reading about Kubla Khan, Coleridge supposedly awoke with a vision and began writing it down, but an interruption caused him to lose much of what he remembered. The poem is therefore known as a dream fragment.
The poem unfolds through two main visions:
- Xanadu, where Kubla Khan builds a pleasure dome amid an exotic, mysterious landscape that includes the sacred river Alph and measureless caverns.
- The Abyssinian maid, whose music inspires the speaker to imagine becoming a prophet-like figure through a state of divine frenzy.
Its supernaturalism comes from combining sensuous images with unsettling or mysterious elements. Rather than following a logical plot, the poem creates a sequence of images through musical language.
Imagination and fancy
Coleridge distinguishes three mental faculties. Primary imagination is the unconscious, shared human power through which people perceive and make sense of the world. Secondary imagination, associated with the poet, consciously transforms perceived reality into something new. Fancy, by contrast, rearranges existing memories and ideas mechanically, without genuine creation. This distinction helps explain Coleridge's imaginative world. In the source's comparison, Wordsworth makes ordinary life seem extraordinary, while Coleridge makes the extraordinary seem believable.