While incomplete and subtitled a " fragment ", its language is highly stylised with a strong emphasis on sound devices that change between the poem's original two stanzas.

*" Casey at the Bat " Web site with biographical details on Thayer, Hopper, Mike " King " Kelly and chronology of the poem's publication.

Coleridge attributed the poem's origins to one of his stays at Ash Farm, possibly the one that happened in October 1797: " This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentry, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797 ".

Some Modernist poets have made the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page an integral part of the poem's composition.

However, it is also possible to read the poem as an allegory on the way fate moves human affairs or as an attempt to comprehend the horrific violence in Europe at the time of the poem's composition.

A major critical issue in considering the Georgics is the assessment of tone ; Virgil seems to waver between optimism and pessimism, sparking a great deal of debate on the poem's intentions.

Another story of the poem's origin claimed that Helmer's funeral was actually held on the morning of May 2 after which McCrae wrote the poem in 20 minutes.

The amount of time it takes to read " The Fish " coincides with the length of time a fish could live outside of water ; likewise, the duration of the long bus ride in " The Moose " coincides with the poem's long first sentence as well as the twenty-some stanzas it takes before the passengers on the bus ( and the reader ) actually encounters the moose.

Opinions vary on establishing any given poem's authenticity.

Presumably at the time of the poem's recitation by the narrator, the raven " still is sitting " on the bust of Pallas.

Some have also noted the predominance of feminine themes and feminine power in the fragment and focus on the poem's perspectives on gender relations.

Early examples of typographically based concrete poetry include the following poem by George Herbert ( 1593 – 1633 ) ( here in a scan of the 1633 edition of Herbert's The Temple ), in which the poem is merely a comment on the title, which presents the poem's principal meaning typographically:

At the obscenity trial, nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf.

Additionally, various literary critics have noted the poem's likely influence on Garcilaso de la Vega's second eclogue.

Grunthos is reported to have been " disappointed " by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.

Sheridan reveled in the fame that Read's poem brought him, renaming his horse Rienzi to " Winchester ," based on the poem's refrain, " Winchester, twenty miles away.

" The poem's discourse ", Honan tells us, " shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present — and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic.

The epic poem's plot takes place in a small town near Mainz, flooded by refugees who fled their villages on the western side of the Rhine in order to seek refuge from the French troops on the eastern side.

The poem's text, as it has survived, is in a very corrupt state ; it ends so abruptly with the request of Medea to accompany Jason on his homeward voyage, that it is assumed by most modern scholars that it was never finished.

" Lucretius on Creation and Evolution offers a bold and sophisticated attempt to come to terms with Lucretius ' arguments on evolution in the spirit of the poem's most ambitious commentators.

Worship towards the soul is through use of the imagination, an idea that shows the influence of William Wordsworth upon the poem's themes.

The title, locale and subject of the poem's descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, Kent, facing Calais, France, at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part ( 21 miles ) of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.

Britannia rule the waves ", even if this was not the poem's original subject ).

The poem's subject, Geraint mab Erbin, was a popular figure in Welsh tradition and is known through a variety of subsequent sources.

The celebration of deeds of ancient Danish and Swedish heroes, the poem beginning with a tribute to the royal line of Danish kings, but written in the dominant literary dialect of Anglo-Saxon England, for a number of scholars points to the 11th century reign of Canute, the Danish king whose empire included all of these areas, and whose primary place of residence was in England, as the most likely time of the poem's creation, the poem being written as a celebration of the king's heroic royal ancestors, perhaps intended as a form of artistic flattery by one of his English courtiers.

This period of his life, coupled with the reality of an impoverished childhood, plays a major role in the meaning behind the poem ; it is also the prime reason for this poem's existence.

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.

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.

Victorian critics praised the poem and some examined aspects of the poem's background.

The 1920s contained analysis of the poem that emphasised the poem's power.

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.

' Amazing Grace ' was not the original title of this hymn: it was originally written as a poem entitled ' Faith's Review and Expectation ' and appears in Book I of the Olney Hymns with the poem's title and ' hymn 41 '.

In the poem, this has been transformed into an abbreviated " and " and given an apostrophe, with every " and " in the poem's additional lines then being written " an ' " as if to match.

The poem borrows occasionally from Carroll's short poem " Jabberwocky " in Through the Looking-Glass ( especially the poem's creatures and portmanteau words ), but it is a stand-alone work, first published in 1876 by Macmillan.

Sometimes, though, the form of the poem resembles or enacts the poem's content, and in this case, a visual iconicity is present.

With the compositional approach he took from the Third Symphony onward, Sibelius sought to overcome the distinction between symphony and tone poem to fuse their most basic principles — the symphony's traditional claims of weight, musical abstraction, gravitas and formal dialogue with seminal works of the past ; and the tone poem's structural innovation and spontaneity, identifiable poetic content and inventive sonority.

Similarly, early in the history of the poem's dissemination in manuscript form, Piers is often treated as the author of the poem.

John Gay, who came a little later was criticized for his poem's artificiality by Doctor Johnson and attacked for their lack of realism by George Crabbe, who attempted to give a true picture of rural life in his poem The Village.

Finally, one critic sees the complexity of the poem's structure resulting in " the first major ' free-verse ' poem in the language ".

The poem's simple diction led Clive James to suggest that Smith attempted to write the poem so that the diction appeared ignorant of poetic convention yet was carefully crafted to appear more simple than it was.

In addition, using imagery in a poem is helpful to develop a poem's tone.