SOURCE: “‘Kubla Khan’ in Context,” in Studies in English Literature, Vol. 21, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, pp. 565-83.

In the following essay, Pearce proposes that Coleridge's notebooks, letters, and early poetry all contain details that are strongly reminiscent of the landscape in “Kubla Khan.”

In the Paradise Lost—indeed in every one of his poems—it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve—are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works.

—S. T. Coleridge¹

The Notebook accounts Coleridge kept of the walking tour of the Lake District which he took with Wordsworth in the fall of 1799 and the detailed entries on other excursions, taken for the most part alone, into the mountains around Keswick the following summer, are among the most interesting pages of natural description to have...