SOURCE: “Inspiration and the Historical Sense in ‘Kubla Khan,’” Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 3-8.

In the following essay, Harding discusses the impact of the Old Testament on Romantic poetry, focusing specifically on “Kubla Khan” as an example.

Coleridge's admiration for the poetry of the Old Testament is well-known. To Coleridge, the Hebrew poets possessed in exemplary form the power of Imagination, the “modifying, and co-adunating Faculty,”¹ which long before the writing of Biographia Literaria took a central place in his critical thought. Their poetry, in contrast to that of the Greeks, exhibited a profound sense of the “one Life” uniting all of nature, that sense to which Coleridge himself tried to give expression in “The Eolian Harp,” where the phrase “animated nature”² suggests a universe constantly permeated by the anima, in Hebrew rûah, or “breath of God.”

The Romantics' adoption of the Old Testament as...