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During 1797 and 1798 the Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, the fine ode to France, the Fears in Solitude, the beautiful lines entitled Frost at Midnight, the Nightingale, the Circassian Love-Chant, the piece known as Love from the poem of the Dark Ladie, and that strange fragment Kubla Khan, were all of them written and nearly all of them published; while between the last composed of these and that swan-song of his dying Muse, the Dejection, of 1802, there is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works.
There were endless devices of colored lamps and lanterns, figures of crosses, crowns, the Seal of Solomon, and the most strange effects produced on foliage and in the water by red and green and purple fires. It was a night of enchantment, and the hotel and its grounds on the dark background of the night were like the stately pleasure-house in "Kubla Khan." But the season was drawing to an end.
"For he on honey dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise." Swinburne says of Christabel and Kubla Khan: "When it has been said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable. There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent submission and wonder." General Characteristics of his Poetry.
Emerson, I think, first clearly stated it. His terms were the literature of "power" and the literature of "knowledge." In nearly all great literature the two qualities are to be found in company, but one usually predominates over the other. An example of the exclusively inspiring kind is Coleridge's Kubla Khan. I cannot recall any first-class example of the purely informing kind.
Indeed his description of the summer palace is better known to Englishmen than any other part of his work, for Shandu is Xanadu, which Coleridge saw in a dream after he had been reading Marco's book and wove into wonderful verse: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph the sacred river ran, Past caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.
Christabel, with Kubla Khan, appeared in 1816, and the Biographia Literaria next year; Zapolya and the rewritten Friend the year after, when also Coleridge gave a new course of lectures, and yet another, the last. Aids to Reflection, in 1825, was the latest important work he issued himself, though in 1828 he superintended a collection of his poems.
The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of Kubla Khan, of Christabel, and of Love, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797-98, he never did anything of the first class in poetry.
He has made a special study of these subterranean matters." "Don't you remember, papa, Coleridge's poem of Kubla Khan? "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea!" "Our sacred river, when we find it, shall be named Miriam." "It ought to be Kamaiakan," she rejoined; "for, if anybody finds it, it will be he."
You may have arrived at the point of keenly enjoying Lamb and yet be entirely unable to "see anything in" such writings as *Kubla Khan* or Milton's *Comus*; and as for *Hamlet* you may see nothing in it but a sanguinary tale "full of quotations."
Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed freely over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have locked him up for a madman.
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