SOURCE: “The False Poets in ‘Kubla Khan,’” English Language Notes, Vol. 26, No. 2, December, 1988, pp. 48-55.

In the following essay, Hewitt suggests that “Kubla Khan” was Coleridge's attempt at evaluating established ideas of poetic creation and ultimately finding them wanting.

Readers choosing to understand “Kubla Khan” as a comment on poetry may deem most concomitant interpretive issues settled some time ago by George Watson:

“Kubla Khan,” then, is not just about poetry: it is about two kinds of poem. We have one of them in the first thirty-six lines of the poem; and though we do not have the other, we are told what it would do to the reader and what it would do to the poet. The reader would be able to visualize a palace and park he had never seen; and the poet would behave after the classic manner of poets, like a madman. This second...