STC's "Kubla Khan"

• Composed most likely 1797-98, though not published until 1816
• Preface includes reference to "The Pitcher," a poem composed in August 1802.
• A poem about the creative process?
• Kubla Khan as poet?

David Hogsette, "Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome:  Poetic Failure in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'"

Thesis:  "'Kubla Khan' offers its readers a series of false poetic figures, ultimately demonstrating that the ideal (pro)creative and redemptive imagination lies beyond the grasp of the mortal poet, remaining an external and unobtainable other."

• Preface:  Rhetorical device foregrounding the poem's performance context.
• "Second section of the preface establishes the poem proper as an allegory of imaginative failure."
• Xanadu: creative realm that "represents the creative cognition and phenomenal mind."
• Biographia Literaria (1817) (see 631-34, esp. 634)
• Fancy: Khan (1st Stanza)
• "a non-creative faculty that is more empirical than the imagination.  It is a lower cognitive faculty related to an influenced by the will, but not dependent upon the will for its operation."
• "For Coleridge, fancy is a distinct faculty, dependent for its materials on the primary IMAGINATION and confined to manipulating, combining, and arranging phenomenal materials but incapable of the creation of materials.  Fancy is , therefore, the lesser faculty by far" (H &H 198).
• "The romantic critics conceived the imagination as a blending and unifying of the powers of the mind that enabled the POET to see inner relationships, such as the identity of truth and beauty. . . .  Leslie Stephen stated the distinction briefly, 'FANCY deals with the superficial resemblances, and imagination with the deeper truths that underlie them.' . . .  Imagination is usually viewed as a 'shaping' and ordering power, the function of which is to give art its special authority" (H&H 250).
• Khan's kingdom--finite--symmetrical dome, rigid towers, confining walls--not an imaginative, ideal realm in which the individual can unite with the infinite.
• Khan is isolated, like the Ancient Mariner, Christabel "who is separated from her dead mother and becomes estranged not only from her lover Geraldine but also her father."
• Author "on brink of poetic genius, is interrupted by a messenger of his surrounding community and ironically loses the imaginative process."
• "It is ironic that an agent from the poet's community--an agent who attempts to conduct business and, thus, to include the poet in the (commercial) workings of that community--effects disunity of the poet's consciousness, resulting in further isolation from the community."
• "Pure Imagination": Primary + Secondary Imagination
• "They are separate only insofar as they serve vaguely different functions."
• Primary Imagination: Alph (2nd Stanza)
• Enacts "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."
• Alph: The beginning [i.e. alpha], signifier of original and eternal creativity.
• The River Alph is the source of the poet's prophetic powers that are achievable only by the primary imagination which unites the finite poet with the 'infinite I AM.'"
• Secondary Imagination: Fountain
• Echoes River as Seconday Imagination echoes Primary.
• "The secondary imagination is a reflection of the primary creative force, a preliminary sensory processor that attempts to unify apparent perceptual disunities into understandable perceptions before presenting them to the primary imagination."
• "Objects in themselves are fixed, dead, indeterminate material, but the powers of the imagination are life-giving in the sense that they transform the indeterminacy of objects in themselves into discursive meanings."
• "The Khan is a failed poet of the fancy who attempts to contain the primary and secondary imaginative faculties, as his walls attempt to enclose the river, only to be left eternally isolated from his ancestral spirits and human community and from the imagination that makes all such connections possible."
• By focusing on the Khan and the dome, "The author clearly rejects the faculties of the active primary and secondary imaginations in favor of an unconscious, passive process that is antithetical to Coleridge's ideal poetic process."
• Like Khan, the author becomes isolated, "a contained failed poet like the Khan who is girdled with towers."
• Without the preface, it would be impossible not to identify Khan and the poet/seer at the end of the poem as ideal agents of the imagination . . . .  [In fact,] Coleridge actually represents the poetic figures as failed poets."
• "Becoming the poet of the imagination for Coleridge is a desire always in process that cannot be obtained."
• "The goal of becoming the sublime imaginative poet for Coelridge was a desire he could not fulfill. . . .  Thus he focused his attentions on proclaiming the imaginative authority of such poets as Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth and establishing his intellectual authority as literary critic, metaphysician, and theologian."