dwarf tree
A
COLERIDGE
COMPANION
©   John Spencer Hill


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Composition, Publication History and the Crewe Manuscript
[62]   The date of Kubla Khan has been much debated and, barring the unlikely discovery of definitive evidence, will doubtless always be a matter of conjecture.   A number of dates -- ranging from the summer of 1797 to the spring of 1800 -- have been proposed.   Coleridge himself stated on one occasion that he wrote the poem "in the fall of the year, 1797" (Crewe MS) and on another that it was composed "In the summer of the year 1797" (1816 Preface).   Authorial statements of this sort are usually conclusive; however, the discrepancy (however slight) between "summer" and "fall" 1797, coupled with Coleridge's unreliability over dates and with some other factors, has led certain scholars to propose a later date.   Nevertheless, while dating arguments for 1798 and 1799-1800 must be taken seriously, most Coleridge scholars in recent years [63] have come to accept the fall of 1797 as the probable date of composition.
      Before looking in detail at the various dating-arguments, we need to pause briefly over two early pieces of evidence that have an important bearing on the question of when Kubla Khan was composed.   The first of these is straightforward.   In a poem entitled Mrs Robinson to the Poet Coleridge, Mary "Perdita" Robinson praised Coleridge's genius in the following couplet:
I'll mark thy "sunny dome," and view
Thy "caves of ice," thy fields of dew!1
These lines were written in October 1800; and, as the two phrases in quotation marks make plain, Mrs Robinson was alluding to Kubla Khan.   We can say with certainty, then, that Kubla Khan was in existence by October 1800 and that "Perdita" Robinson had seen it by then.
      The second piece of evidence is earlier, but its significance is not so easily determined.   At the end of her Hamburgh Journal (1798) Dorothy Wordsworth inserts a tantalising reference:
[William] brought me his pockets full of apples . . . and some excellent bread.   Upon these I breakfasted and carried Kubla to a fountain in the neighbouring market-place, where I drank some excellent water.   It was on Saturday the 6th of October [1798] when we arrived at Goslar at between 5 and 6 in the evening.2
The most plausible explanation of this enigmatic allusion is that the Wordsworths in Germany had playfully named their drinking-can "Kubla" in honour of Coleridge's poem.3   If this is so, then it argues strongly that Kubla Khan was written sometime before the Wordsworths and Coleridge set off for Germany in September 1798 -- unless (as Elisabeth Schneider argues) Dorothy wrote up this section of her Hamburgh Journal between 1799 and 1802 after returning to England, in which case the reference to "Kubla" might involve a retrospective nicknaming of their German drinking-can.4   On balance, however, although Dorothy's journal entry is vague, it offers a serious obstacle to a post-1798 dating of Kubla Khan and provides (to speak positively) strong circumstantial evidence that the poem was written before September 1798.   And at this point we may turn to examine the various dating-arguments.
  [64]     One suggestion, proposed initially by E.H. Coleridge and J.D. Campbell, places the composition of the poem in May-June 1798.   The argument for this date was prompted by Coleridge's Notebook entry of 3 November 1810:
If ever there was a time and circumstance in my life in which I behaved perfectly well, it was in that of C. Lloyd's mad quarrel & frantic ingratitude to me -- He even wrote a letter to D[orothy] W[ordsworth], in which he not only called me a villain, but appealed to a conversation which had passed between him & her, as the grounds of it . . . .   After this there succeeded on his side a series of wicked calumnies & irritations -- infamous Lies to Southey & to poor dear Lamb -- in short, a conduct which was not that of a friend, only because it was that of a madman / On my side, patience, gentleness, and good for evil -- yet this supernatural effort injured me -- what I did not suffer to act on my mind, preyed on my body -- it prevented my finishing the Christabel -- & at the retirement between Linton & Porlock was the first occasion of my having recourse to Opium . . . .       (CN, iii 4006)
In the 1816 Preface to Kubla Khan Coleridge had written:   "In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire."   Taken together, these two statements led E.H. Coleridge to believe that Kubla Khan was written during this retirement prompted by the mental and physical strain of the quarrel with Charles Lloyd and that, since the "quarrel was at its height in May 1798", Coleridge "should have written 'the summer of 1798'" in the 1816 Preface (CPW, i 295).   J.D. Campbell accepted this argument and extended it:
Coleridge is generally unreliable in the matter of dates assigned to particular single events, but I think we may trust him when he synchronises.   Besides, it seems far more probable that Kubla Khan was composed after Christabel ([Part] I.) and The Ancient Mariner, than that it was the first breathing on his magic flute.5
A 1798 dating for Kubla Khan is supported by Malcolm Elwin,6 and also by Lawrence Hanson, who explores four possible periods in March-June 1798 when the "retirement" might have taken place.7
  [65]     Although a date in 1798 -- specifically, May 1798 -- is certainly possible, there are a number of difficulties with the arguments in its favour.   First, while Coleridge connects opium with a "retirement between Linton & Porlock" in his note of 3 November 1810, he says nothing about composing a poem then; he mentions the abandonment of Christabel but not the composition of Kubla Khan (or of anything else).   Besides, the note is inaccurate in at least one respect, since May 1798 is demonstrably not "the first occasion of [Coleridge's] having recourse to Opium".   One such lapse of memory might well lead one to suppose that there are others.   Second, there is some doubt that Coleridge had sufficient opportunity in April or May 1798 for even a brief "retirement" at Porlock.   Both E.K. Chambers and Elisabeth Schneider, who have studied Coleridge's movements carefully during these months, conclude that he was probably at or close to Nether Stowey during this time.8   Third, as Schneider points out, since the quarrel with Charles Lloyd was a matter which preyed on Coleridge for some years, "E.H. Coleridge appears to have telescoped into a month or two events that had actually been spread over several years".9   And, finally, one must surely distrust the logic of arguing (as both J.D. Campbell and Lawrence Hanson do) that "the perfection of the poem [Kubla Khan], and particularly . . . its metrical beauty, would suggest that it was the last and not the first of the three great poems".10   By analogy, we should find ourselves having to argue that Shakespeare must have written Timon of Athens before King Lear or that Coleridge must have composed The Nightingale before Frost at Midnight because the latter are more perfect and beautiful works.
      Another solution to the dating-riddle is proposed by Elisabeth Schneider, who devotes a ninety-page chapter to the problem in her book Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan".   She offers two possible dates -- October 1799 or May-June 1800 -- and concludes that "The date of October, 1799, seems to me slightly more likely than that of the following May or June, but either would appear possible".11   Why 1799 or 1800?   The argument is too elaborate to permit any easy summary; however, it may be said that, in broad outline, it involves five major observations.   (1) The major influence on Kubla Khan is Milton, especially Paradise Lost, and "I know of no other such Miltonic months in Coleridge's life as those running, roughly, from August, 1799, to the spring of 1800".12   (2) There are in Kubla Khan numerous echoes of and [66] tonal parallels with two other poems, Landor's Gebir and Southey's Thalaba, which Coleridge read in 1799-1800.   (3) The imagery of Kubla Khan seems to have been influenced by the scenery which Coleridge saw in Germany (especially in the Harz Mountains) in late 1798 and in 1799 -- and these impressions were reinforced by the rugged scenery of the West and North of England which he explored with Southey and Wordsworth in August-November 1799 after returning from Germany.   (4) Having explored the connections between Kubla Khan and Southey's Thalaba, Miss Schneider quotes at length a letter of December 1799 (LW: EY, pp. 279-80) from Wordsworth to Coleridge, which recalls some of the imagery of Coleridge's poem, and concludes that between May and December 1799 "there was a concentration of interest among Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey upon many of the images, ideas, and words that we find in Kubla Khan".13   Internal poetic evidence also supports a 1799-1800 date:
No verse . . . distinctly resembling that of the "dream"-fragment appears among the poems known to have been written in 1797 or 1798.   In 1799 and 1800, the Ode to Georgiana and the several others of a like sort were a conscious departure from Coleridge's recent metrical forms, and Kubla Khan most closely resembles these.14
      Miss Schneider's arguments, however, have not met with much success among other scholars.15   This is due, in part, to the awkward necessity of having to explain away a damaging piece of (apparently) solid evidence for a pre-1799 dating -- namely, the reference to "Kubla" in Dorothy Wordsworth's Hamburgh Journal for October 1798.   As Miss Schneider herself says, "Uncertainty must remain about any date after 1798 because of Dorothy Wordsworth's word 'Kubla'".16   In part, too, there is the problem of the strained and inferential nature of the case.   For example, Coleridge knew Milton's poetry well long before 1799 and Milton is arguably the most important poetic influence on Coleridge from the beginning of his career.   Similarly, the impact of German scenery and the scattered echoes of Landor and Southey can be easily paralleled, usually much more persuasively, in the Somerset scenery and the literary works in which Coleridge was immersed while living at Nether Stowey in 1797-8.   Finally, the appeal to internal poetic evidence is a double-edged sword:   there is nothing [67] in Coleridge's 1799-1800 verse that comes as close in imagery and tone to the spirit of Kubla Khan as the "o'erwooded, narrow, deep" and "roaring dell" of This Lime-Tree Bower (July 1797) or certain wild and "romantic" passages in his drama Osorio (March-October 1797).
      The third, and most widely accepted, date for Kubla Khan is October or November 1797.   Until the discovery of the Crewe Manuscript in 1934, the only evidence from Coleridge himself about the poem's composition was to be found in the 1816 Preface, where the date given is "the summer of the year 1797".   But that date has never seemed reasonable because Coleridge was too busy and his movements in July-August 1797 are too well documented to make a "retirement" near Porlock possible in the summer of that year.   In the Crewe Manuscript endnote, however, Coleridge says of Kubla Khan,
This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797.
I shall return later to the Crewe Manuscript and the discrepancies between its account of the poem and that given in the 1816 Preface; for the moment it is enough to notice that the date given for the composition of Kubla Khan in the Crewe endnote is, not the summer, but "the fall of the year, 1797".   On the basis of this change of season Alice Snyder, who first reported the discovery of the Crewe Manuscript, suggested that the dating question -- which had been resolved in favour of May 1798 -- should be reopened with this new evidence in mind.17
Click the images for two rather fine
color photographs of Culbone Church

      The question was reopened.   E.K. Chambers, who had been a vigorous supporter of a May 1798 date, undertook to re-examine the evidence in his biography (1938) of Coleridge.   His conclusion was that Kubla Khan was, in all probability, composed in the fall of 1797 -- and he thought it possible to date it even more precisely.   On 14 October 1797 Coleridge had written a letter to John Thelwall, in which he excused his delay in replying to Thelwall by saying that he had "been absent a day or two" from Stowey; and in this same letter he went on to say:   "My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great -- something one & indivisible -- and it is [68] only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!" (CL, i 349).   Coleridge's absence from Stowey, coupled with the reference to "rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns" (which recalls the imagery of Kubla Khan), led Chambers to believe that the poem was written in October 1797, a few days before the letter to Thelwall.18   A number of later scholars have been led to the same conclusion.19
      But even more attractive than Chambers's October 1797 dating is the possibility that Kubla Khan was written in the following month, November 1797, while Coleridge was on a walking-tour with the Wordsworths -- a tour which took the trio to Porlock and then on (as Dorothy records20) to Lynmouth and the Valley of the Rocks (or Valley of Stones) near Lynton.   Initially suggested (almost as an aside) by H.M. Margoliouth in 1953, the case for supposing Kubla Khan to have been written on this walking-trip with the Wordsworths in early November 1797 has been argued convincingly by Mark Reed:
it makes sense to suppose that STC should have retired to a farm "between Porlock and Linton" on this trip, for he was certainly (which cannot be said of the early Oct date) in that neighbourhood.  If his illness involved dysentery from the onset, an immediate retirement would have been necessary.   Nothing whatever is known of STC's movements during his absence of "a day or two" in early Oct, and it is hard to perceive why he would have traveled so far -- well over twenty miles -- merely to sequestrate himself for such a brief time if sickness was the cause of his leaving Stowey -- least of all if his sickness was actually dysentery.21
This is a persuasive argument, and it agrees perfectly with Coleridge's own account in the Crewe endnote.   John Beer, who has also been persuaded by Reed's case, offers a hypothetical reconstruction (adding a conjecture about the man from Porlock) of the "retirement" during which Kubla Khan was composed:   "while returning from the Valley [of the Rocks], Coleridge was taken ill and forced to retire to the lonely farmhouse, while William and Dorothy Wordsworth continued on their way back (on their way possibly, despatching the 'person on business from Porlock' to bring supplies of some sort to Coleridge)".22   All in all, while other dates remain possible, a November 1797 dating of Kubla Khan is [69] the most attractive possibility and makes the best use of the scanty evidence.
      As a kind of footnote to the dating-discussion, it may be added that there have been attempts to identify the very farmhouse to which Coleridge retired and wrote Kubla Khan.   There have been two suggestions.   Wylie Sypher, noting that there are only ten houses in the whole parish of Culbone and that only three farmhouses have ever been built within a mile of Culbone Church, settled on Ash Farm, "a squat, tidy cottage of gray stone" which still stands today.23   Morchard Bishop, on the other hand, basing his argument on Coleridge's statement (1830) that "I wrote Kubla Khan in Brimstone Farm between Porlock and Ilfracombe -- near Culbone", identified the house as Broomstreet Farm, "since there is no record . . . of any farm in the neighbourhood that goes by the name of Brimstone".24   Since Ash Farm is much closer to being "a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church" (Crewe endnote) than is Broomstreet Farm, most scholars have preferred the former and have argued that "Coleridge, if he did confuse the real name of the farm long after the event, could have turned Ash into Brimstone as easily [as] Broomstreet into Brimstone".25   However, J. H. Goodland (who agrees with Bishop) points out that "the local dialect could account for a mishearing; 'Broomstreet' is still pronounced 'Brimson' in the locality" (CN, iii 4006n).   Once again, then, there is no consensus -- nor does a definitive conclusion seem possible.




The history of Kubla Khan from its composition to its publication in May 1816 is almost a complete enigma.   Although Coleridge alludes briefly to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan in two Notebook entries of 1802 and 1804 (CN, i 1281 and 1840), he never mentions Kubla Khan; and the Notebook entries seem unrelated to the poem.   A Notebook entry of October 1806 (CN, ii 2882) concerned with Pindar may, Miss Coburn suggests, be linked with an attempt to continue Kubla Khan, but the poem is not mentioned and the connection between the two is a mere guess.   Potentially more interesting is another Notebook entry, belonging to May-August 1811, which echoes the imagery of lines 25-7 of Kubla Khan:   "Channels riverless -- 5 mile deep" (CN, iii 4094); but, again, it is difficult to see how these cryptic phrases might be linked meaningfully with the poem.   And these [70] dark hints (if, indeed, they have any relevance at all) are all that Coleridge's Notebooks yield on the poem's history between the time of its composition and the time of its publication.   Coleridge's letters (apart from one of March 1798 to which I shall return) are no more enlightening.   It is not known where he kept the poem, or whether he revised it much between 1797 and 1816, or why he delayed so long in publishing it.   It is known that he recited it occasionally:   John Payne Collier records that in a conversation (c. 1811-12) Coleridge recited "some lines he had written many years ago upon the building of a Dream-palace by Kubla-Khan"; and Leigh Hunt, probably in early April 1816, was almost present at another recital:   "He recited his Kubla Khan one morning to Lord Byron, in his lordship's house in Piccadilly, when I happened to be in another room.   I remember the other's coming away from him, highly struck with his poem, and saying how wonderfully he talked".26
      It was this recital of Kubla Khan just missed by Leigh Hunt that resulted, in fact, in the poem's publication.   At Byron's instigation, the publisher John Murray visited Coleridge in April 1816 and offered to publish both the incomplete Christabel and Kubla Khan.   In the final bargain Coleridge received 80 pounds for the former and 20 pounds for the latter.   On 25 May 1816 Murray published an octavo pamphlet of sixty-four pages entitled Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep, which ran through three editions in the course of the year.   In the Preface by which Coleridge introduced Kubla Khan, he acknowledged his debt to Lord Byron:   "The following fragment", the Preface begins, "is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity . . . ."
      The remainder of the 1816 Preface is given over to an explanation of how Kubla Khan came to be written.   It is a story that everyone now knows.   The poet, in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse; as the result of a "slight indisposition", he had taken an "anodyne" and fallen asleep while reading about Kubla Khan's palace in Purchas's Pilgrimage.   Continuing "for about three hours in a profound sleep", his dreaming mind (triggered by what he had been reading in Purchas) was swept up into a poetic vision of some 300 lines -- a vision so powerful and immediate that "all the images rose up before him as things".   Upon awaking he eagerly set about transcribing his dream-vision, when, unfortunately, he was "called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him [71] above an hour".   Returning to his room, he discovered to his great dismay that, "though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"   Nevertheless, "from the still surviving recollections in his mind", he has often proposed to finish for himself "what had been originally, as it were, given to him".   And he closed the account with a motto from Theocritus:   "Tomorrow I'll sing a sweeter song."
      For more than one hundred years this account of the poem's composition, together with the text of the poem published in 1816 (and subsequently reprinted in Coleridge's collected poems of 1828, 1829 and 1834), were all that scholars had of Kubla Khan. No transcriptions of the poem (assuming there ever were any) had survived, and no manuscript of the poem was known to exist.   But in 1934, in the Lamb and Coleridge Centenary Exhibition held in the National Portrait Gallery, there suddenly appeared an autograph manuscript of Kubla Khan, loaned to the exhibition by the Marquess of Crewe.   The significance of the Crewe Manuscript is that it contains a number of variants, most but not all of them fairly minor, from the text of the poem as published in 1816; and, more important, it provides an alternative and much shorter account of the poem's birth -- an account which differs in significant respects from that given in the 1816 Preface.
      The Crewe Manuscript (Plates 8 and 9) is a holograph in Coleridge's handwriting on both sides of a single sheet.   Attempts to date the manuscript have been unsuccessful, although it is universally believed that, while not the original version of the poem, it pre-dates the text published of 1816, probably by some years.   T.C. Skeat has managed, with some guesswork, to trace the history of the Crewe Manuscript:
The only possible clue to its origin is a faint pencilled note at the end of the manuscript:   "Sent by Mrs Southey,27 as an Autograph of Coleridge."  From this we may conjecture that the manuscript was originally sent by Coleridge to Southey, passed into Mrs Southey's possession after the latter's death in 1843, and was subsequently given by her to some private autograph collector.   It subsequently appeared in the sale-room of Messrs Puttick & Simpson on 28 April 1859, when, as lot 109, it was knocked [72] down to Monckton Milnes, owner of a noted collection of autographs, for the modest sum of l pound 15 shillings.   From him it descended to his son, afterwards Marquess of Crewe, so the history of the manuscript from 1859 onwards is established.28 
It need only be added that in 1962 the manuscript was acquired from the Marchioness of Crewe by the British Museum, where it now resides as Additional MS 50847.
      Since the Crewe Manuscript is an earlier text than the version of Kubla Khan published in 1816, the variants give us a glimpse, as it were, into the poet's workshop.   Sometimes a variant shows how a passable line is improved by slight revision, as, for example, in line 17 when "From forth this Chasm with hideous Turmoil seething" (Crewe MS) is changed to "And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething" (1816 text).   Sometimes, however, seemingly minor alterations are more important and revealing.   There are two such instances.   First, lines 6-7 in the two versions are as follows:
So twice six miles of fertile ground
With Walls and Towers were compass'd round.
                                        (Crewe MS)

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round.
                                        (1816 text)
The changes from "six" to "five" and from "compass'd" to "girdled" show how Coleridge gradually refined on what he found in Purchas his Pilgrimage, where he read that Kubla built his palace by "encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall" (emphasis added).   Many suggestions, including a number of Freudian ones, have been made to account for these changes.   The second important alteration occurs in line 41, where the Abyssinian maid is "Singing of Mount Abora" (1816 text). John Livingston Lowes had sifted through countless volumes looking for Mount Abora and had come up empty-handed.   The reason for his failure to locate it became apparent when the Crewe Manuscript came to light, for Coleridge had there written "Mount Amora" and then changed that (with a stroke of the pen) to "Mount Amara".   Now, whatever may be said of "Mount Amora" (a slip of the pen? a Freudian slip?), "Mount Amara" leads us straight to Coleridge's [73] source in Milton's Paradise Lost: "Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard, /Mount Amara, though this by some suppos'd / True Paradise . . .' (iv 280-2).   Why Coleridge subsequently changed "Amara" to "Abora" in the 1816 text has been a matter of heated scholarly debate and need not detain us here; all we need notice for the moment is that Crewe Manuscript variants lead directly to the two major influences on Kubla Khan, namely, Purchas his Pilgrimage and Milton's Paradise Lost.   All of the other variants in Kubla Khan are minor and have been listed and described by a number of scholars.29
      The issue of the 1816 Preface is, however, another matter.   In the Crewe Manuscript there is no preface; there is only a brief endnote (quoted above, p. 67) in which Coleridge describes, tersely and succinctly, how Kubla Khan came to be written.   At times, the account of the poem's composition in the Crewe endnote throws useful light on the 1816 Preface and makes precise things which are there left vague:   thus, the "slight indisposition" and the unnamed "anodyne" of the 1816 Preface are identified specifically in the Crewe endnote as "dysentery" and "two grains of Opium".   At times, the two accounts flatly disagree, as we have already seen on the question of when the poem was written:   "in the fall of the year, 1797" (Crewe MS) or "In the summer of the year 1797" (1816 Preface).   Scholarship has shown that the information in the Crewe endnote is reliable and that, where the two accounts overlap (as on the question of the date of the poem's composition), the Crewe version is to be preferred.   But the Crewe endnote is short and omits much that is included -- indeed, much that is most memorable -- in the 1816 Preface.   How much of the elaborate account in the 1816 Preface should we believe?   Is it substantially true? or an embellishment of the truth?   Or is it, as has often been suggested, a fabrication and a Coleridgean excuse for another incompleted work, which we should dismiss out-of-hand?   The reliability and general worth of the 1816 Preface to Kubla Khan has been, since the discovery of the Crewe Manuscript, perhaps the most hotly debated issue in Coleridge studies -- and for this reason I have set aside a later section of this chapter to discuss the matter.


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Notes
[Click on asterisk (*) at the end of a note to return to the point you left in the text]
    [249]
  1. Quoted and discussed in Lowes, Road to Xanadu (cf. Introduction, n 1), pp. 321-4. *
  2. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols (London, 1941; repr. 1959) i 34. *
  3. H.M. Margoliouth, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1795-1834 (London, 1953; repr. New York, 1966) p. 49.   Margoliouth's conjecture is supported by Mary Moorman (WW, i 412-13) and, with reservations, by Elisabeth Schneider (Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan", esp. p. 305).   At one time it was assumed that Dorothy was referring to a manuscript copy of Kubla Khan, but that interpretation no longer has any currency.   Jean Robertson, in RES, n.s. 18 (1967) 438-9, offers a third interpretation:   she proposes that Dorothy, whose German was weak, may have intended to write Kübel ("a vat, tub, milking-pail or bucket") or a diminutive form Küblein -- but this solution seems far-fetched and more ingenious than the original problem. *
  4. Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan" (cf. Introduction, n 1), pp. 216-18, 298-305. *
  5. J.D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:   A Narrative of the Events of his Life (London and New York, 1894; repr. Highgate, 1970) p. 89. *
  6. Malcolm Elwin, The First Romantics (London, 1947) pp. 226-32. *
  7. Lawrence Hanson, The Life of S.T. Coleridge:   The Early Years (London and New York, 1938; repr. New York, 1962) pp. 259-60, 282 and 487  n. 115. *
  8. E.K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:   A Biographical Study (Oxford, 1938; repr. 1967) p. 101; Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan" pp. 158-61. *
  9. Ibid., p. 165. *
  10. Hanson, Coleridge:   The Early Years, p. 260. *
  11. Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan", p. 236. *
  12. Ibid., p. 200. *
  13. Ibid., p. 186. *
  14. Ibid., p. 214. *
  15. To my knowledge only two other serious attempts have been made to defend a 1799-1800 date:   Warren Ober, "Southey, Coleridge, and Kubla Khan", JEGP, 58 (1959) 414-22; and Jean Robertson, in RES, (above, note 3) 438-9. *
  16. Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan", p. 236. *
  17. Alice Snyder, "The Manuscript of Kubla Khan", TLS, 2 Aug 1934, p. 541. *
  18. Chambers, Coleridge:   A Biographical Study, pp. 100-3. *
  19. Wylie Sypher, "Coleridge's Somerset:   a Byway to Xanadu", PQ, 18 (1939) 353-66; E.L. Griggs, CL, i 348-9; Mary Moorman, WW, i 346 ("late September or October 1797"); Molly Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:   A Bondage of Opium (London, 1974; repr. 1977) pp. 251-2. *

    [250]
  20. "[From Porlock] we kept close to the shore about four miles.   Our road lay through wood, rising almost perpendicularly from the sea, with views of the opposite mountains of Wales:   thence we came by twilight to Lynmouth, in Devonshire.   The next morning we were guided to a valley at the top of one of those immense hills which open at each end to the sea, and is from its rocky appearance called the Valley of Stones.   We mounted a cliff at the end of the valley, and looked from it immediately on to the sea" (LW: EY, p. 194). *
  21. Mark Reed, Wordsworth:   The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1967) pp. 208-9  n. 33. *
  22. John Beer, "Coleridge and Poetry:   i. Poems of the Supernatural", in S.T. Coleridge (Writers and their Background series), ed. R.L. Brett (London, 1971) pp. 53-4  n. 1. *
  23. Sypher (above, note 19) 364-5. *
  24. Bishop (cf. Introduction, n. 3), p. 293. *
  25. D.H. Karrfalt, "Another Note on Kubla Khan and Coleridge's Retirement to Ash Farm", N&Q n.s. 13 (1966) 171-2.   See also Beer, in S.T. Coleridge, p. 60; and Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (Masters of World Literature series) (New York, 1968; London, 1969; repr. 1973) p. 76  n. 7. *
  26. See Coleridge's Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare, ed. T. Ashe (London, 1897) p. 17; and The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. Roger Ingpen, 2 vols (London, 1903) ii 58. *
  27. Skeat's note:   "This has sometimes been read as 'Mr Southey' but 'Mrs' is a much more probable reading." *
  28. T.C. Skeat, "Kubla Khan", British Museum Quarterly, 26 (1963) 78. *
  29. Snyder, in TLS, 2 Aug 1934; E.H.W. Meyerstein, "A Manuscript of Kubla Khan", TLS, 12 Jan 1951, p. 21; John Shelton, "The Autograph Manuscript of Kubla Khan and an Interpretation", REL, 7 (1966) 30-42.   Shelton provides both a photocopy of the Crewe Manuscript and a transcription of it. *


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Document Completed:   26/04/96