SOURCE: Bahti, Timothy. “Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fragment of Romanticism.” Modern Language Notes 96, no. 5 (December 1981): 1035-50.

In the following essay, Bahti evaluates “Kubla Khan” as it encapsulates the self-fragmenting quality of Romanticism.

I wrote reflections that, in many ways, were even stronger than their origin.

—Derek Walcott

[Der] negative Sinn … entsteht, wenn einer bloß den Geist hat, ohne den Buchstaben; oder umgekehrt. …

—Friedrich Schlegel¹

When Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” appeared in 1816, the contemporary reviewers spoke of the poem's “nonsense.” This “nonsense” was immediately related to the ostensibly partial character of the poem: it was not wholly a meaningful poem, but only meaningless music; or else, Coleridge had dared too much, and therefore succeeded at only little, or even nothing at all, that was meaningful.² Even when the poem was soon judged very positively, the discussion remained within the confines of the question of partiality and meaning: “Kubla Khan...