Charles Lamb, poet and friend of Coleridge, witnessed Coleridge's work towards publishing the poem and wrote to Wordsworth: " Coleridge is printing Xtabel by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision of Kubla Khan – which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings Heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it ".

When turning to the background of the works, he argued, " Coleridge as Coleridge, be it said at once, is a secondary moment to our purpose ; it is the significant process, not the man, which constitutes our theme.

The character of Matilda was highly praised by Coleridge as Lewis's masterpiece, and is said to be “ exquisitely imagined ” and “ superior in wickedness to the most wicked of men.

Even Wordsworth's close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge said ( referring especially to the " child-philosopher " stanzas VII and VIII of Intimations of Immortality ) that the poems contained " mental bombast ".

* Samuel Taylor Coleridge also spent time at Dove Cottage and is said to have muttered stanzas from his poem " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner " whilst walking across the fells to Grasmere.

Later critics said of the actual plan that, being the proposal of Coleridge, it had at least enough of a poetical character to be eminently unpractical ( Quarterly Review, cxiii, 379 ); but the treatises by Archbishop Richard Whately, Sir John Herschel, Professors Peter Barlow, George Peacock, Augustus de Morgan, and others, were considered excellent.

:" Accordingly we set off and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet, and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the " Ancient Mariner ", founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend, Mr. Cruikshank.

That said, the man of whom Russell Kirk wrote, " as a critic of ideas, perhaps there has not been his peer in England or America since Coleridge ," has much to offer the discriminating Christian reader.

" Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war ... Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong ... Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings ... Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe.

The same may be said of much of the early blank verse of Coleridge.

This structure may have been the inspiration for Coleridge ’ s “ pleasure dome .”

Next, Etain drinks coffee, remembers a dream about a poem by “ Sam Coleridge ”, and narrowly escapes an explosion ( unfazed ).

He acknowledges that it is “ the offspring of no common genius ,” that the “ underplot ... is skilfully and closely connected with the main story, and is subservient to its development ,” that the story Lewis weaves in about the bleeding nun is “ truly terrific ” and that he cannot recall a “ bolder or more happy conception than that of the burning cross on the forehead of the wandering Jew .” Coleridge gives his highest praise to the character of Matilda, whom he believes is “ the author ’ s master-piece.

Coleridge continues by saying that “ the errors and defects are more numerous, and ( we are sorry to add ) of greater importance .” Because “ the order of nature may be changed whenever the authors purposes demand it ” there are no surprises in the work.

Moral truth cannot be gleaned because Ambrosio was destroyed by spiritual beings, and no earthly being can sufficiently oppose the “ power and cunning of supernatural beings .” Scenes of grotesquery and horror abound, which are a proof of “ a low and vulgar taste .” The character of Ambrosio is “ impossible ... contrary to nature .” Coleridge argues that the most “ grievous fault ... for which no literary excellence can atone ” is that “ our author has contrived to make of enchantments and witchcraft ‘ ‘ pernicious ’ ‘, by blending, with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition ,” commenting with the immortal line that “ the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale .” Coleridge finishes the piece by explaining that he was “ induced to pay particular attention to this work, from the unusual success which it has experienced ” and that “ the author is a man of rank and fortune.

It is possible that the words of Purchas were merely remembered by Coleridge and that the depiction of immediately reading the work before falling asleep was to suggest that the subject came to him accidentally.

The poem's claim that the narrator would be inspired to act if the song of the maid could be heard was a belief that Coleridge held regarding Evans after she become unattainable to him.

" The next review came in the January 1817 Monthly Review, with the anonymous reviewer questioning: " Allowing every possible accuracy to the statement of Mr. Coleridge, we would yet ask him whether this extraordinary fragment was not rather the effect of rapid and instant composition after he was awake, than of memory immediately recording that which he dreamt when asleep?

When discussing Christabel, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, an anonymous reviewer in the October 1893 The Church Quarterly Review claimed, " In these poems Coleridge achieves a mastery of language and rhythm which is nowhere else conspicuously evident in him.

As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference to tutelary spirits: " Suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.

Also living at Greta Hall with Southey and supported by him were Sara Coleridge and her three children following their abandonment by Coleridge and the widow of fellow poet Robert Lovell and her son.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a key figure in Romantic thought, science and medicine, was also knowledgeable about Hunter's work and writings and saw in him the seeds of Romantic medicine, namely as regards his principle of life, which he felt had come from the mind of genius.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him " the best modern poet ", whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak.

Bowen's services to his leader, Sir John Coleridge, helped to procure for him the appointment of junior counsel to the treasury when Sir John had passed, as he did while the trial proceeded, from the office of Solicitor General to that of Attorney-General ; and from this time his practice became a very large one.

* In Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the title character saves the world, in part by time-travelling from the present day to distract Coleridge from properly remembering his dream ; if Coleridge had completed the poem an alien ghost would have ' encoded ' certain information within the completed work that would have allowed him to make repairs to his spaceship in the past at the cost of wiping out all life on Earth.

In February 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a letter to Thomas Poole: " I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own life with honesty — not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.

The boy's talents secured him the friendship of William Hazlitt, who introduced him to Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I should place Rogers next in the living list ( I value him more as the last of the best school ) — Moore and Campbell both third — Southey and Wordsworth and Coleridge — the rest, οι πολλοί polloi in Greek — thus :— ( see image reproduced on this page ).

In 1822, Sara Coleridge published Account of the Abipones, a translation in three large volumes of Martin Dobrizhoffer, undertaken in connexion with Southey's Tale of Paraguay, which had been suggested to him by Dobrizhoffer's volumes ; and Southey alludes to his niece, the translator ( canto, iii, stanza 16 ), where he speaks of the pleasure the old missionary would have felt if "… he could in Merlin's glass have seen / By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught.

Doyle returns to London, where the last magician, Romanelli, kidnaps him, Jacky, and Coleridge.

In a drugged stupor, Coleridge frees Horrabin's twisted menagerie of monsters, allowing him and Jacky to escape.

His family called him Coleridge Taylor.

:" Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention ; but certain parts I myself suggested: — for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime, and his own wanderings.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived nearby at Nether Stowey ( between Bridgwater and Minehead ), was interrupted during composition of his poem Kubla Khan by " a person on business from Porlock ", and found afterward he could not remember what had come to him in a dream.

" Arthur Coleridge described him as " the wisest master who has ever been at Eton.

Before the Romantics, Shakespeare was simply the most admired of all dramatic poets, especially for his insight into human nature and his realism, but Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge refactored him into an object of almost religious adoration or " bardolatry " ( from bard + λατρεία, Greek for worship — a word coined by George Bernard Shaw ), who towered above mere mortal writers, and whose plays were to be worshipped as not " merely great works of art " but as " phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers " and " with entire submission of our own faculties " ( Thomas de Quincey, 1823 ).

In the 19th century the term Psilanthropism, was applied by such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who so called his own view that Jesus was the son of Joseph.

The book Coleridge was reading before he fell asleep was Purchas, his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation to the Present, by the English clergyman and geographer Samuel Purchas, first written in 1613.

The text about Xanadu in Purchas, His Pilgrimage, which Coleridge admitted he did not remember exactly, was: " In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.

These were both times he was in the area, and, by 1799, Coleridge was able to read Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer, a work which also drew on Purchas's work.

The work was set aside until 1815 when Coleridge compiled manuscripts of his poems for a collection titled Sibylline Leaves.

The collection of poems was published 25 May 1816, and Coleridge included " A Fragment " as a subtitle to the 54 line version of the poem to defend against criticism of the poem's incomplete nature.

Printed with Kubla Khan was a preface that claimed an opium induced dream provided Coleridge the lines.

However, the odal hymn as used by others has a stronger unity among its parts, and Coleridge believed in writing poetry that was unified organically.

It is possible that Coleridge was displeased by the lack of unity in the poem and added a note about the structure to the Preface to explain his thoughts.

Towards the end of 1797, Coleridge was fascinated with the idea of a river and it was used in multiple poems including Kubla Khan and " The Brook ".

Coleridge believed that the Tartars were violent, and that their culture was opposite to the civilised Chinese.

Coleridge, when composing the poem, believed in a connection between nature and the divine but believed that the only dome that should serve as the top of a temple was the sky.

However, Coleridge did believe that a dome could be positive if it was connected to religion, but the Khan's dome was one of immoral pleasure and a purposeless life dominated by sensuality and pleasure.

She is also similar to the later subject of many of Coleridge's poems, Asra, based on Sara Hutchinson, whom Coleridge wanted but was not his wife and experienced opium induced dreams of being with her.

Of the sources, Coleridge was influenced by the surrounding of Culbone Combe and its hills, gulleys, and other features including the " mystical " and " sacred " locations in the region.

Although Asra / Hutchinson is similar to the way Coleridge talks about the Abyssinian maid, Hutchinson was someone he met after writing Kubla Khan.

Before the poem was published, it was greatly favoured by Byron, who encouraged Coleridge to publish the poem, and it was admired by many people including Walter Scott.