Page "Kubla Khan" Paragraph 133

In 1981, Kathleen Wheeler contrasts the Crewe Manuscript note with the Preface: " Contrasting this relatively factual, literal, and dry account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the poem with the actual published preface, one illustrates what the latter is not: it is not a literal, dry, factual account of this sort, but a highly literary piece of composition, providing the verse with a certain mystique.

" In 1985, David Jasper praised the poem as " one of his greatest meditations on the nature of poetry and poetic creation " and argued " it is through irony, also, as it unsettles and undercuts, that the fragment becomes a Romantic literary form of such importance, nowhere more so than in ' Kubla Khan '.

" When talking about the Preface, Jasper claimed that it " profoundly influenced the way in which the poem has been understood ".

Responding in part to Wheeler in 1986, Charles Rzepka analysed the relationship between the poet and the audience of the poem while describing Kubla Khan as one of " Coleridge's three great poems of the supernatural ".

He continued by discussing the preface: " despite its obvious undependability as a guide to the actual process of the poem's composition, the preface can still, in Wheeler's words, lead us ' to ponder why Coleridge chose to write a preface ... ' What the preface describes, of course, is not the actual process by which the poem came into being, but an analogue of poetic creation as logos, a divine ' decree ' or fiat which transforms the Word into the world.