Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He wrote it in 1797, and it was published in 1816. It is a poem from the Romantic era, a time when people often made art about nature and emotions. Coleridge said that he wrote the poem after a dream he had, while on opium. He said that he was interrupted by a person from Porlock while he was writing it, and never got to finish it. Some people say that this is not completely true.

The first stanza of the poem describes a pleasure dome and a river called Alph, and the second stanza talks about an Abyssinian maid.

Kubla Khan Media

• 

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge at age 42
• 

  The Crewe manuscript, handwritten by Coleridge himself some time before the poem was published in 1816

• 

  Title page of Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep (1816)

• 

  Xanadu (here called Ciandu, as Marco Polo called it) on the French map of Asia made by Sanson d'Abbeville, geographer of King Louis XIV, dated 1650. It was northeast of Cambalu, or modern-day Beijing.

• 

  Debre Damo, an amba (flat-topped mountain) in Ethiopia similar to Amba Geshen (Mount Amara)

• 

  Lord Byron, second-generation Romantic poet who encouraged Coleridge's publication of "Kubla Khan", by Richard Westall

• 

  Self-portrait of William Hazlitt, Romantic critic who wrote the first negative review of "Kubla Khan"

• 

  Leigh Hunt, second-generation Romantic poet who praised "Kubla Khan"

• 

  T. S. Eliot, poet and literary critic