Kubla Khan

Though left uncompleted, “Kubla Khan” is one of the most famous examples of Romantic era poetry. In it, Samuel Coleridge provides a stunning and detailed example of the power of the poet’s imagination through his whimsical description of Xanadu, the capital city of Kublai Khan’s empire. Samuel Coleridge penned “Kubla Khan” after waking up from an opium-induced dream in which he experienced and imagined the realities of the great Mongol ruler’s capital city. Coleridge began writing what he remembered of his dream immediately upon waking from it, and intended to write two to three hundred lines. However, Coleridge was interrupted soon after and, his memory of the dream dimming, was ultimately unable to complete the poem. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree Kublai Khan lives on in the popular imagination thanks to these two lines of poetry by Coleridge. But the true story behind this legend is even more fantastic than the poem would have us believe. He inherited the second largest land empire in history from his grandfather, Genghis Khan. He promptly set about extending this into the biggest empire the world has ever seen, extending his rule from China to Iraq, from Siberia to Afghanistan. His personal domain covered sixty-percent of all Asia, and one-fifth of the world's land area. The West first learnt of this great Khan through the reports of Marco Polo. Kublai had not been born to rule, but had clawed his way to leadership, achieving power only in his 40s. He had inherited Genghis Khan's great dream of world domination. But unlike his grandfather he saw China and not Mongolia as the key to controlling power and turned Genghis' unwieldy empire into a federation. Using China's great wealth, coupled with his shrewd and subtle government, he created an empire that was the greatest since the fall of Rome, and shaped the modern world as we know it today. He gave China its modern-day borders and his legacy is that country's resurgence, and the superpower China of tomorrow.

This book endorses Coleridge's statement: "nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so". It conceives of "Kubla Khan" as of a hypnotic poem, in which the "obtrusive rhythms" produce a hypnotic, emotionally heightened response, giving false security to the "Platonic Censor", so that our imagination is left free to explore higher levels of uncertainty. Critics intolerant of uncertainty tend to account for the poem's effect by extraneous background information. The book consists of three parts employing different research methods. Part One is speculative, and discusses three aspects of a complex aesthetic event: the verbal structure of "Kubla Khan", validity in interpretation, and the influence of the critic's decision style on his critical decisions. The other two parts are empirical. Part Two explores reader response to gestalt qualities of rhyme patterns and hypnotic poems in perspective of decision style and professional training. Part Three submits four recordings of the poem by leading British actors to instrumental investigation.

This study contains an analysis of the poem Kubla Khan. It provides an examination of the construct of the poem as a whole and its modern effect in terms of influence upon others (for example, Poe, Tennyson, Forster, and Bowen).

The development of the mythological school of European Biblical criticism.

This study describes in detail the development of Coleridge's attitude to nature as it is reflected in his poetry. It analyses the different stages of Coleridge's search for a meaningful relation to nature from an uncritical adoption of the eighteenth century conventions in his early poetry to a projectionist view in his poems of 1802. It offers challenging new readings of some of Coleridge's major poems like 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Dejection: an Ode', and tries to rehabilitate some minor ones, like 'The Picture'. Attention is also paid to his relation with Wordsworth. It discusses in detail the philosophical background of Coleridge's views and considers the contribution of German thought to his development. As a whole this study affords a new insight into the genesis of romanticism in England.

An introduction to the thirteenth-century Chinese emperor which offers a more complete picture of the man than books which treat him as just a supporting player in Marco Polo's adventures.