Research Paper on:
'Kubla Khan' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
the poem was enigmatic and not particularly good. The Monthly Review of January 1817 reported that the Kubla Khan was "below criticism" (Ball 298). William Hazlitt, one of Coleridges  contemporary poets, wrote a review in which he expressed the opinion that Coleridge wrote "better nonsense verse than any man in England" (Leask 1). Hazlitt added that Kubla Khan was  not "so much a poem but a musical composition" (Leask 1). As this suggests, since the time when Kubla Khan first appeared in print, readers and critics alike have  wondered at its meaning. Recent opinion toward Kubla Khan is summed up by Jerome McGann who states that this poem is concerned with the "poetical faculty itself and  (its) central problem...that the faculty might lose its potency...its concrete symbols deliberately forego any immediate social or cultural points of reference in order to engage with its audience at a  purely conceptual level" (Leask 2). An examination of the Kubla Khan supports this estimation and provides the clearest understanding of this lyrically beautiful vision. Some critics argue that the  poem actually begins with the 1816 preface that describes how Coleridge came to write Kubla Khan, after a opium-induced sleep of about three hours. In this preface, Coleridge explains  that in the summer of 1797, he retired in "ill health" to a "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton" (231). Because of a "slight indisposition," he took a medicinal remedy  that put him promptly to sleep. At that time, such remedies typically contained opium. Leask writes that there is a short after-note of the "Crewe Manuscript" that has an account  of the poems composition that states that Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan "in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery...in the