Coleridge: The Preface to Kubla Khan – Analysis – The Educational Hub: Bringing joy to education

Format: Video

Subject Matter: dream, exotic, imagination, nature, pleasure dome, the sublime, vision

"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Preface. An analysis.

Before we can understand "Kubla Khan", we need to reckon with its preface — one of the most fascinating and unreliable documents in English literary history.

Coleridge tells us the poem ...was composed spontaneously during an opium dream in the summer of 1797, interrupted by the famous "person on business from Porlock" before it could be completed. Almost every detail of this account is questionable. The date is wrong. The source text he cites is misidentified — and badly misquoted. The book he claims to have been reading was unlikely to have been available where he was staying. And the degree of intertextuality between "Kubla Khan" and works by Milton, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and others raises serious doubts about whether the poem could really have been a spontaneous unconscious outpouring.

Was the person from Porlock real? Was the opium dream? Is the preface an elaborate fiction — or, as this video concludes, something more interesting: an embellished account of what really happened, in which the context of the poem's creation is itself as much a part of "Kubla Khan" as the poem itself?

Ano Sensei (aka John R. Yamamoto-Wilson) holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught English literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, for many years.

For more "Kubla Khan" videos, please check the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFVd8IPkCwc&list=PLzVb6yL_jY6_WsK09gs-uE-t_UmSeOiQg

0:00 Introduction
0:10 Basic information about the preface to Kubla Khan
0:32 Kubla Khan and Lord Byron
0:59 A "psychological curiosity"
1:22 Where and when "Kubla Khan" was written
2:43 "Kubla Khan" and opium
3:16 How much can we trust Coleridge?
3:29 Purchas, pilgrims and pilgrimages
3:43 Coleridge misquotes his source - badly
4:25 Doubts about Coleridge's reliability
4:55 Editing of "Kubla Khan"
5:21 Intertextuality and "Kubla Khan"
5:33 Lamb, Milton, Johnson, Shakespeare, the Bible...
5:57 Coleridge's account of his opium dream
6:30 Thomas Love Peacock's scepticism
7:05 The person from Porlock
8:14 Does it matter?
8:49 Why it matters

If subtitles are not available in your language, let me know and I will add them.

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3 Comments

@Soma-gt6qk

February 24, 2022

I’m from India. I wish he was my professor, he makes this poem very easy to understand .His lecture was absorbing. Greatly appreciated and a joy to listen to. MY respect and admiration to you. Merci. 💖🙏

@anosensei

Thank you for your kind comment. I’m afraid I am retired from teaching now. These videos are my way of reaching people now!

The complete series of “Kubla Khan” videos, with a range of viewing options, is available here: https://tinyurl.com/anokubla

Coleridge: The Preface to Kubla Khan – Analysis