Paper Topic:

The Poem --Kubla Khan

How Coleridge 's Kubla Khan Defied Poetic Convention

Introduction

Setting up a novel idea is just one way to produce a creative work , like poetry . But , another important way is to stimulate our imagination . Most people behave unimaginatively not because they lack imagination , but because they fear the reaction their ideas will receive . In time , they grow used to suppressing ideas that differ from the norm , ideas that might raise eyebrows . This is exactly what Samuel Taylor Coleridge surpassed when he published his celebrated poem Kubla Khan . He defied suppressing his

creative imagination ' and demonstrated his lively interest in how the creative imagination works

Kubla Khan ' was not published until 1816 , but the reviews which it then received justified Coleridge 's hesitations . Most found the poem unintelligible and uninteresting . Coleridge 's early and generally conventional poems received high praise . What most critics bash about Kubla Khan ' is how Coleridge gave inconsistent reports of his poetic experience , and that some of his reports are flatly contradicted by documentary evidence . Mahony (1999 ) informed that

Nineteenth-century critics tended to dismiss it [Kubla Khan] as a rather inconsequential or meaningless triviality . In large part , this was due to Coleridge 's own introduction to the poem . When it was first published in 1816 , he subtitled it A Vision in a Dream : A Fragment ' The preface went on to note that it was only being published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron] , and , as far as the Author 's own opinions are concerned , rather as a psychological curiosity , than on the ground of any supposed poetic merit ' Coleridge was taken at his word , and for nearly a century the poem was dismissed . After its publication , poet and critic Thomas Moore included the previous quote in his critique in The Edinburgh Review adding that he That same year another critic , Josiah Condor , voiced a similar opinion in The Eclectic Review , expressing regret that Coleridge had even bothered to have the poem published and comparing it to a mutilated statue

Aside from the inconsistent historical reports of the poem , Coleridge was also criticized of its lack of poetic merits . As Hewitt (1988 noted

The Khan 's method results in an illusory , a shaky structure on the brink of overthrow by the elements it could momentarily ignore but not permanently exclude . The first section draws to a close by adumbrating the destruction of the Khan 's little world : it addresses ancestral voices prophesying war ' and it shifts its focus from the pleasure-dome to the shadow of the pleasure-dome appearing on waves , waves to which the excluded river and fountain have contributed and which can , by a bit of agitation , break up the mere illusion reflected on them . Following from the architectural vehicle , the tenor of the metaphor indicates the unstable and incomplete nature of a Neo-classicism that tries to exclude structural and thematic elements inconvenient to its limited design . It implies that the poet must take into account all parts of...

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