Kubla Khan tale may have been genius ‘self-promotion’
‘He would see an edition of his poems on the bookshelf and pull it out and start making pencil annotations’
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S tale of writing “Kubla Khan” in an opiuminduced reverie is perhaps one of the greatest tales of the creative spark in English literary history.
But was it a genius act of self-promotion to whip up interest in his poem?
An exhibition in Somerset, where Coleridge composed the work in 1797, is grappling with the possibility.
It has on display a so-called fair copy, or final draft, of “Kubla Khan” alongside an edition of Purchas, His Pilgrimes, the book Coleridge claims to have fallen asleep while reading and from which he took the poem’s famous opening lines.
Much of the mystery stems from the fact that it is not known exactly when Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan”.
The exhibition is able to show that the words that made it to press in 1816 were not quite the raw stream of consciousness Coleridge might have implied.
No original manuscript exists, but the fair copy shows differences from the final edition, suggesting that Coleridge tweaked it over the years. That’s not a surprise, said William Keach, professor emeritus at Brown University in Rhode Island and a Coleridge expert. “Coleridge never treated his poems as if they were finished. There are stories about his being invited for dinner and he would ... see an edition of his poems on the bookshelf and pull it out and start reading it and making pencil annotations in the margins.”
The poet claimed that having taken two grains of opium “to check a dysentery”, he had fallen asleep reading Samuel Purchas’s book and woken up with the words for “Kubla Khan” pouring forth. He was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock, leaving him with “a vague and dim recollection of... the vision” and unable to write another word.
Alexandra Ault, a lead curator at the British Library, which has loaned the copy of “Kubla Khan”, said that perhaps Coleridge had “made the story bigger and more exciting” as a form of selfpromotion.