SOURCE: “‘Most Capital Enemies of the Muses’: War, Art, and ‘Kubla Khan,’” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 396-408.

In the following essay, Bright surveys three ideas as the thematic sources of “Kubla Khan”—that art is spontaneous and unexpected, that art can only flourish in peacetime, and that great rulers create the peace that is essential for the creation of great art.

Like some Victorian explorer intent upon discovering the source of the Nile, John Livingston Lowes pursued the manifold streams of Coleridge's reading to reveal the literary origins of “Kubla Khan,” and in The Road to Xanadu Lowes disclosed where his searches had led him. So exhaustively thorough was this scholarly adventurer that he left few sources to investigate, and, since the publication of his book in 1927, those few have apparently all been traced. Consequently, when Walter Jackson Bate in 1968 wrote about the various attempts...