SOURCE: Coleridge, Opium, and "Kubla Khan," The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 238-88.

Schneider's study is considered by many scholars one of the most important interpretations of "Kubla Khan" in the twentieth century. In the following excerpt, the critic considers the poem an incomplete fragment and discusses its form and texture, which evoke "the soul of ambivalence, oscillation's very self."

"Kubla Khan" has been read with equal conviction as cosmic allegory and incantatory nonsense; and with reference to both meaning and form it has been described equally as a fragment and a perfectly rounded complete whole. It has been called the quintessential poem of romanticism, even while its magical virgin birth placed it quite outside literary tradition or pedigree. To the aesthetic purist these may still be peripheral questions; they must be acknowledged, however, to lead at least in the direction of the poetic essence itself. They will...