SOURCE: '"The Raven: A Christmas Poem': Coleridge and the Fairy Tale Controversy," in Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr., The University of Georgia Press, 1991, pp. 14-35.

In the following excerpt, Watson examines "The Raven: A Christmas Tale" as "a tongue-in-cheek, yet serious argument on Coleridge's side of the debate " over the value of fairy tales.

The Other World of fairy tale was familiar ground for Samuel Taylor Coleridge throughout his life. The intense fascination surrounding his earliest childhood reading of The Arabian Nights (which he read in secret dread and delight) finds adult play in his most complex theological and philosophical writing. Despite the general strictures of the time against fairy tales, the genre is central to "Christabel" and also makes a strong contribution to Coleridge's other well-known poems of mystery, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan...