Page "Kubla Khan" Paragraph 131

In the same year as Radley, George Watson argued that " The case of ' Kubla Khan ' is perhaps the strangest of all – a poem that stands high even in English poetry as a work of ordered perfection is offered by the poet himself, nearly twenty years after its composition, as a fragment.

Anyone can accept that a writer's head should be full of projects he will never fulfil, and most writers are cautious enough not to set them down ; Coleridge, rashly, did set them down, so that his very fertility has survived as evidence of infertility.

" He later argued that the poem " is probably the most original poem about poetry in English, and the first hint outside his notebooks and letters that a major critic lies hidden in the twenty-five-year-old Coleridge.

" In conclusion about the poem, Watson stated, " The triumph of ' Kubla Khan ,' perhaps, lies in its evasions: it hints so delicately at critical truths while demonstrating them so boldly.

The contrasts between the two halves of the poem ...

So bold, indeed, that Coleridge for once was able to dispense with any language out of the past.

It was his own poem, a manifesto.

To read it now, with the hindsight of another age, is to feel premonitions of the critical achievement to come ...

But the poem is in advance, not just of these, but in all probability of any critical statement that survives.

It may be that it stands close to the moment of discovery itself.

" After responding to Eliot's claims about Kubla Khan, Yarlott, in 1967, argued that " few of us question if the poem is worth the trouble " before explaining that " The ambiguities inherent in the poem pose a special problem of critical approach.

If we restrict ourselves to what is ' given ', appealing to the poem as a ' whole ', we shall fail probably to resolves its various cruxes.

Hence, there is a temptation to look for ' external ' influences ...

The trouble with all these approaches is that they tend finally to lead away from the poem itself.

" When describing specifics, he argued, " The rhythmical development of the stanza, too, though technically brilliant, evokes admiration rather than delight.

The unusually heavy stresses and abrupt masculine rhymes impose a slow and sonorous weightiness upon the movement of the iambic octosyllabics which is quite in contrast, say, to the light fast metre of the final stanza where speed of movement matches buoyancy of tone.

" Following in 1968, Walter Jackson Bate called the poem " haunting " and said that it was " so unlike anything else in English ".