Writing ‘Kubla Khan’

SIR – Samuel Taylor Coleridge may well have exaggerated the circumstances in which his poem Kubla Khan was composed (report, June 14).

Apparently, 16 years before it was published, he showed the manuscript to Mary “Perdita” Robinson (17571800), the actress, poet, and mistress of the Prince of Wales, who quoted bits of it in one of her own poems.

In 1791 (six years before Kubla Khan) she had written a poem called The Maniac in a similar laudanum-induced state, dictating it “faster than it could be committed to paper … On the ensuing morning, Mrs Robinson had only a confused idea of what had passed, nor could be convinced of the fact till the manuscript was produced. She was perfectly unconscious of having been awake while she composed the poem.” But the intervention of the “person on business from Porlock” was Coleridge’s unique addition to the romantic myth of the drug-induced artwork. Graham Chainey

Brighton, East Sussex