You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In reading the Kubla Khan of Coleridge, “that most notable fragment, which breathes in every word and line the spirit of adventure, unreality, and glamorous escape from reality” (12), I was for a prolonged period struck by its want of — and I know no better or nearer term — poetic value. It remained a mystery to me why it should be so highly praised, for I recognized in it nothing more than a rather grotesque fantasy of a type not unsuited to an addict's pen, but quite lacking in that high spiritual beauty which so informs and perfuses The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Not until recently, on re-examining the preface of 1816, did the clue to its meaning, its complex and apparently random imagery, and the influence which it seems to exercise over the imagination of others, become clear.
“The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” (4) How on waking, he proceeded to commit those impressions to paper until summoned on business, Coleridge then relates, and how, on return to the project, the entire structure of the proposed poem had vanished from mind, save only those fragments which were already written. It is with this small portion that analysis must be concerned; and analysis first of all requires a digression into Silberer and Freud.
Silberer was first to conceive that dreams might possess, in addition to their psychoanalytic, an anagogic, interpretation