Scenes of Infinite Closure: Kubla Khan and the Cave of Yordas (original) (raw)

‘Kubla Khan’ and its Narratives of Possible Worlds

Changing English 20.4 (2013): 404-08

This essay argues that Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ is a poem about narrative and specifically focuses on the narrative construction of possible worlds, or even utopian worlds. It notes two pairs of narratives. In pair one the utopian narrative of the monarch’s decree which seeks to build a space of pure pleasure is in opposition to the narrative of a prophesy of war. In the second pair the Abyssinian maid’s lyric is undermined by the narrative of amnesia where the speaker is unable to recall the lyric. The poem concludes, the essay suggests, with the idea that a possible world can be created only if we can recall the narrative foundations of this world.

Coleridge diffracted : translating the opening lines of “Kubla Khan”

« Prismatic Translation », ed. Matthew Reynolds, 2020

This paper traces the surprisingly varied ways in which the names ‘Xanadu’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ – in Coleridge’s poem – have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Russian, showing that this diffraction extends ‘a poetic process of translation and appropriation’ first undertaken by Coleridge himself when he translated the names into his poem.

"Kubla Khan" Reconsidered. In: The Coleridge Bulletin

The Coleridge Bulletin, 2012

John Beer draws a sweeping parallel between Luther’s vision after a period of ‘intense thinking’ and the state of the ‘Author’ in the preface to ‘Kubla Khan’ to argue that the poem’s images were ‘the subject of intense thought on Coleridge’s part’. In fact, both ‘Kubla Khan’ (c.1797) and the introductory note Coleridge attached to it in 1816 can be productively reread in the context of Coleridge’s essay on Luther and Rousseau in The Friend. The ‘Author’, like Luther, has a ‘vision in a dream’: falling asleep over Purchas’s Pilgrimage, he has a vision of Kubla’s dome, while Luther, falling asleep over the Bible, has a hallucination of the devil. I will argue that apart from the fact that Coleridge speaks about Luther very much as he does of himself in the preface, both the poem supplemented by the preface and the essay on Luther and Rousseau offer commentaries on the political implications of the relationship between hallucinatory reading, poetic vision, and the potentially dangerous, daemonic power of words. For Luther’s hallucinatory reading is also linked, in Coleridge’s mind, to his being a ‘great poet’. However, being ‘possessed’ by his visions, and ‘acting’, rather than ‘writing’ poems, he also resembles, according to Coleridge, the ‘crazy Rousseau’, whose words had ‘direful’ consequences (F II 110-121). Associating possession with the dangerous power of words, the essay on Luther and Rousseau can thus bring into focus the political potentials of the ‘Author’s’ original vision, the performative character of Kubla’s speech act, as well as the historical implications of the ecstatic ‘I’ of the last stanza. It may eventually suggest that the introductory note to ‘Kubla Khan’ can be read as a second ‘decree’, a written declaration that can distance the conservative Coleridge from his own poem. It may indicate that the Coleridge of 1816 (as opposed to Luther, Rousseau, Kubla Khan, and the ‘Author’ of 1797 described in the preface) is a poet-critic, someone who re-reads his own poem in an attempt to avert its potentially ‘direful’ consequences.

Kubla Khan: A Poem of Sexual Ambiguity

Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” had it not been for the opium, would have remained a fantasy, dreamed and lost. Certainly the poem is the most intricate work, and full of poet‟s desire to portray the idea of grandeur synaesthetically. “Kubla Khan” is, also, among other things, a poem full of ironic reflections on the on the legendary architectural feat of the Mughals. This paper will draw an analogy that depicts how this has been achieved.

“Kubla Khan”: The Grandiose Dream of the Divine Artificer

Prajna, 1994

Norman Fruman (1971) called Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘the divine artificer’ for having come up with so grandiose a dream and so divine an artifice as his “Kubla Khan”. No doubt, then, that his scholarly book on the entire gamut of Coleridge’s poetic works titled Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel wrought a revolutionary change in the research on the poet. Greater was its significance because it came forty-four years after John Livingstone Lowes (1927) gave to the world the seminal work on the poet’s creative writing titled The Road to Xanadu.

Artistic Immortality as an Objet Petit a: The Subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences , 2022

This study presents a psychoanalytical reading of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” having an eye on Žižek’s theory of the subject. “Kubla Khan” contains a host of components providing an illustration of Coleridge’s psychological status. In such a case, Žižekian approach to psychoanalysis could provide a suitable paradigm for an analytical reading of the poem. The works of Žižek conducted disputatious re-articulations of the subject/object, the displacement of an objet petit a (object of desire) with object-cause of desire, and parallax. Žižek, like Hegel, accentuates the one-to-one relationship of the subject and the object while introducing parallax and the ticklish subject, which are later followed by tickling object. It is thus possible to illustrate the psychoanalytical status of Coleridge in the course of writing “Kubla Khan.” The poem pictures a path to immortality while it is in search to immortalize its poet too. In this study, it is demonstrated how Coleridge followed his objet petit a, which is ‘artistic immortality,’ in the lines of “Kubla Khan.”

THE ROMANTIC CONCEALMENT OF DESIRE: COLERIDGE'S AND WORDSWORTH'S POETIC VOICES

Littera Aperta 6 (2018), 5-28, 2018

The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and William Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake's "The Book of Thel" and John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.

Behind the Dream of the Arab. The Non-Publication of Wordsworth’s The Prelude

Orbis Litterarum, 2009

This essay asks why Wordsworth did not publish his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, in 1805 when it was all but completed, but postponed publication indefinitely. It suggests that this is a complex question that needs a complex answer. The answer must take into consideration at least sociological aspects having to do with the literary marketplace, and metaphysical aspects having to do with the extent to which personal 'presence' is established in a work in manuscript as opposed to one published as a printed book around 1800. Having dealt with this material in its first part, in its second part the essay suggests that this question and its multiple answers are part of the meaning of one of the poem's cruxes, the so-called Dream of the Arab.