* A fictional river mentioned in the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Focus on the impact of a Little Ice Age on the empire, as the empire, beginning with a sharp drop in temperatures in the 13th century during which time the Mongol leader Kubla Khan moved south into China.

Title page of Kubla Khan ( 1816 )

Kubla Khan () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816.

According to Coleridge's Preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan.

Most modern critics now view Kubla Khan as one of Coleridge's three great poems, with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.

Coleridge described how he wrote the poem in the preface to his collection of poems, Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep, published in 1816:

In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in ' Purchas's Pilgrimage :' ' Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.

In 1934, a copy of the poem known as the Crewe Manuscript was discovered and it contained a note about the origin of Kubla Khan.

However, the exact date of the poem is uncertain because Coleridge normally dated his poems but did not date Kubla Khan.

The thoughts expressed in Coleridge's letter date Kubla Khan to October 1797, but two alternatives have been postulated by Coleridge's biographers: May 1798 and October 1799.

Title page of Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep ( 1816 )

The poem remained buried in obscurity until a 10 April 1816 meeting between Coleridge and George Gordon Byron, a younger poet, who persuaded Coleridge to publish Christabel and Kubla Khan as fragments.

Leigh Hunt, another poet, witnessed the event and wrote, " He recited his ' Kubla Khan ' one morning to Lord Byron, in his Lordship's house in Piccadilly, when I happened to be in another room.

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 ".

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

There is a heavy use of assonance, the reuse of vowel sounds, and a reliance on alliteration, repetition of the first sound of a word, within the poem including the first line: " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan ".

The stressed sounds, " Xan ", " du ", " Ku ", " Khan ", contain assonance in their use of the sounds a-u-u-a, have two rhyming syllables with " Xan " and " Khan ", and employ alliteration with the name " Kubla Khan " and the reuse of " d " sounds in " Xanadu " and " did ".

There also is strong a break following line 36 in the poem that provides for a second stanza, and there is a transition in narration from a third person narration about Kubla Khan into the poet discussing his role as a poet.

Kubla Khan is also related to the genre of fragmentary poetry, with internal images reinforcing the idea of fragmentation that is found within the form of the poem.

The poem's self-proclaimed fragmentary nature combined with Coleridge's warning about the poem in the preface turns Kubla Khan into an " anti-poem ", a work that lacks structure, order, and leaves the reader confused instead of enlightened.

" Preface " of Kubla Khan ( 1816 )

The Preface of Kubla Khan began by explaining that it was printed: " at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits ".

The claim to produce poetry after dreaming of it became popular after Kubla Khan was published.

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 ".

He thought that a dome was an attempt to hide from the ideal and escape into a private creation, and Kubla Khan's dome is a flaw that keeps him from truly connecting to nature.

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

However, the immediate response to the 1816 collection was to ignore Christabel and Kubla Khan or to just attack Kubla Khan.

William Roberts's review, for the August 1816 British Review, was more positive than previous analysis but with no detail about the work: " passing over the two other poems which are bound together with ' Christabel ', called ' The Fragment of Kubla Khan ', and ' The Pains of Sleep '; in which, however, there are some playful thoughts and fanciful imagery, which we would gladly have extracted if our room would have allowed it.

Roosevelt was riddled with chest pains, fighting a fever that soared to 103 ° F ( 39 ° C ), and at times so delirious that he would repeat endlessly the opening line from Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan.

Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was famously interrupted in the middle of an opium-induced writing session of Kubla Khan by a " person from Porlock.

Realising Michael was influenced by Coleridge's works, Dirk instructs Reg to take them to the 19th century, allowing Dirk to interrupt Coleridge long enough to disrupt the ghost's possession and prevent the second part of " Kubla Khan " from ever having been written.

Xanadu was visited by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo in about 1275, and in 1797 inspired a famous poem, Kubla Khan, by one of the leading English poets of the Romanticism movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

It was here he wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

The Person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan.

Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed.

It has been suggested by Elisabeth Schneider ( in Coleridge, Opium and " Kubla Khan ", University of Chicago Press, 1953 ), amongst others, that this prologue, as well as the Person from Porlock, was in fact fictional and intended as a credible explanation of the poem's seemingly fragmentary state as published.

Purchas his Pilgrimage was one of the sources of inspiration for the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

' Kubla Khan ' is a poem of the same kind, in which the mystical effect is given almost wholly by landscape.

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.

" During the same year, Jack Stillinger claimed that " Coleridge wrote only a few poems of the first rank – perhaps no more than a dozen, all told – and he seems to have taken a very casual attitude toward them ... he kept Kubla Khan in manuscript for nearly twenty years before offering it to the public ' rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits '".