SOURCE: "Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan': A Metaphor for the Creative Process," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4, November, 1986, pp. 17-29.

In the following essay, Milne provides an analysis of the symbolism in "Kubla Khan " and postulates that Xanadu is a metaphor of the human mind.

I

Although debate continues over whether or not the head-note Coleridge published with "Kubla Khan" in 1816 should be regarded as a factual account of the poem's origin, recent studies have suggested that regardless of its basis in fact the headnote serves most importantly as what Warren Stevenson calls [in his "'Kubla Khan' as Symbol," in Texas Studies in Literature 14, 1973], an "imaginative adjunct to the poem." In that context, the headnote can be seen as "a prose imitation of the poem it introduces," functioning "in part as argument and gloss" [Irene H. Chayes, "'Kubla Khan' and the Creative Process," Studies in Romanticism 6, 1966]. Such an understanding...