Page "Kubla Khan" Paragraph 134

During the 1990s, critics continued to praise the poem with many critics placing emphasis on what the Preface adds to the poem.

David Perkins, in 1990, argued that " Coleridge's introductory note to Kubla Khan weaves together two myths with potent imaginative appeal.

The myth of the lost poem tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and dispelled irrecoverably.

" Also in 1990, Thomas McFarland stated, " Judging by the number and variety of critical effort to interpret their meaning, there may be no more palpably symbolic poems in all of English literature than Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner.

" In 1996, Rosemary Ashton claimed that the poem was " one of the most famous poems in the language " and claimed the Preface as " the most famous, but probably not the most accurate, preface in literary history.

" Richard Holmes, in 1998, declared the importance of the poem's Preface while describing the reception of the 1816 volume of poems: " However, no contemporary critic saw the larger possible significance of Coleridge's Preface to ' Kubla Khan ', though it eventually became one of the most celebrated, and disputed, accounts of poetic composition ever written.

Like the letter from the fictional ' friend ' in the Biographia, it brilliantly suggests how a compressed fragment came to represent a much larger ( and even more mysterious ) act of creation.