SOURCE: “‘Kubla Khan’: That Phantom-World So Fair” in Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Leonard Orr, G. K. Hall, 1994, pp. 71-80.

In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Magnuson theorizes that “Kubla Khan” shares many themes and images with Coleridge's “conversation poems.”

Coleridge's Fame as a poet rests on the achievement of the mystery poems, “Kubla Khan,” “The Ancient Mariner,” and “Christabel.” The Conversation Poems, if they are known to a general audience, are regarded uncritically as minor efforts in a mode more properly Wordsworthian, even though they precede “Tintern Abbey” and clearly stand as a paradigm that Wordsworth varies. At first sight the easy conversational middle style and the presence of other persons seem quite different from the more pronounced artfulness and solitary vision of “Kubla Khan.”

Although it appears to be the creation of an entirely different poet, “Kubla Khan” repeats several motifs of...