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From the very beginning, readers have sensed in Coleridge's Kubla Khan something that, by conventional, puritanical standards, was disturbing and uncanny—even unwholesome. And, despite the impact of depth psychology, much of the enormous amount of critical interpretation of the poem continues to reflect this uneasiness about its import, often—as I shall indicate—beclouding its own deeper insights.
No doubt, Coleridge himself had a deeply ambivalent attitude towards his creation, and it helps explain his silence about the poem until, with the encouragement of Lord Byron, that representative of a more liberated era, he ventured to publish it in 1816, eighteen or nineteen years after its composition, and even then to the vexation of his prudish wife, who referred to it disdainfully as his “Koula-Khan.” Yarlott's plausible theory is that Wordsworth rejected Christabel, another disturbingly ‘decadent’ poem by Coleridge, for a new edition of Lyrical Ballads, because he and Dorothy became “sensitive to the poem's unusual sexual features.”11 In Wordsworth's poems and letters and in Dorothy's journals and letters, there is complete silence about Kubla Khan, except for the enigmatic reference to “Kubla” in Dorothy's record of her German trip, a reference that, with many other stubborn facts, blocked Elisabeth Schneider's attempted demonstration that Kubla Khan must be dated later than October, 1797, or May, 1798, the two most generally accepted dates.2
The Blisses, in their article in the American Imago, which shocked so many by calling attention to the explicitly sexual imagery of the poem, argued that Coleridge's loss of poetic power was due to an inner conflict about the fundamentally