"Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan Dynasty. Coleridge claimed he wrote the poem in the autumn of 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor, England, but it may have been composed on one of a number of other visits to the farm. It also may have been revised a number of times before it was first published in 1816.
The poem's ...
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"Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan Dynasty. Coleridge claimed he wrote the poem in the autumn of 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor, England, but it may have been composed on one of a number of other visits to the farm. It also may have been revised a number of times before it was first published in 1816.
The poem's opening lines are often quoted, and it introduces the name Xanadu (or Shangdu, the summer palace of Kublai Khan):
Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem's subtitle A Vision in a Dream) but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock. A note on a manuscript by Coleridge explicitly states that he had taken opium at the time to combat dysentery. Some have speculated that the vivid imagery of the poem stems from a waking hallucination, most likely opium-induced. Additionally,...
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