SOURCE: “The Faults of Vision: Identity and Poetry (A Dialogue of Voices, with an essay on Kubla Khan)” in Identity of the Literary Text, edited by Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller, University of Toronto Press, 1985, pp. 119-45.

In the following excerpt, Hamlin notes that “Kubla Khan” remains a challenge for critics because of its visionary and inspired text, and that while it is a poem that displays the Romantic power of imagination it is also a text that stands on its own as a poetic statement.

‘mingled Measure’ in Kubla Khan1

Sameron adion asō: but the to-morrow is yet to come. 

Kubla Khan occupies a special place among English Romantic poems. Few texts have received so much critical attention, and few of the major Romantic lyrics make so persuasive a claim for what might be called visionary or inspired discourse. Romantic poetics privileges the powers of the...