SOURCE: “Two Notes on ‘Kubla Khan,’” in Charles Lamb Bulletin, No. 102, April, 1998, pp. 64-5.

In the following essay, Chandler discusses various sources that may have inspired Coleridge to write a particular line in “Kubla Khan.”

‘i Would Build That Dome in Air’

In an important article of 1985, ‘“Kubla Khan” and Michelangelo's Glorious Boast’,¹ Jack Stillinger made a significant contribution to our understanding of Coleridge's most enigmatic poem by demonstrating that the key line, ‘I would build that dome in air’, almost certainly derives from a ‘boast’, at one time attributed to Michelangelo, that the cupola of St Peter's would be equivalent to the Pantheon suspended in the air. Unfortunately most of Stillinger's illustrations of the currency of the ‘boast’ postdate the composition of ‘Kubla Khan’, but, with the assistance of Philipp Fehl, he found three examples that predate it (in works of 1692, 1781 and 1789). To his list can be...