SOURCE: “The Topography of Initiation in ‘Kubla Khan,’” Ball State University Forum, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter, 1981, pp. 69-78.

In the following essay, Strickland builds upon the thesis that “Kubla Khan” is a mythographic account of its own creation.

I

If it has become a critical commonplace that the subject of “Kubla Khan” is poetry, more specific questions of intentionality in Coleridge's symbolism remain open to debate. Does the poem speak of poetry in general or of itself in particular? Among recent interpretations, those of Suther, Shelton, Purves and Patterson suggest variations of the first alternative, while Chayes and Watson have analysed the poem in its bipartite structure as a critique of itself.¹ I hope to refine the second argument further by emphasizing the reflexiveness of poesis and poem in “Kubla Khan,” approaching the work not so much as a fragment-cum-commentary as a mythographic account of its own creation, a...