Spontaneous Overflow

Abstract

Everybody knows Coleridge's story, in the preface to its publication in 1816, of how he allegedty wrote Kubla Khan, and everyone knows how Professor Livingstone Lowes has shown, in his book The road to Xanadu, how he believes the poem happened.

Personally, I consider Coleridge's story a literary hoax. 1 cannot believe that Kubla Khan is a fragment, interrupted and unfinished. I believe if to be rather a Romantic manifesto, the poetic equivalent and anticipation of Wordsworth's famous Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The poem was written in November 1797, but not published until 1816.)

The full title of the poem reads : Kubla Khan, or A vision in a dream; A
fragment. The alternative title gives us the key to the structure of the poem.
The dream occupies the first 36 lines; next follows the vision (the word occurs
in line 38); then comes the synthesis of these two in the poem's final statement.