SOURCE: Review of Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson, pp. 273–77. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970.

In the following excerpted review originally published in Scourge and Satirist in 1816, the unsigned critic launches a diatribe against Coleridge's eccentric literary sensibility occasioned by the poet's offering of “Kubla Khan” as a fragmentary dream vision.

If [the poetic lines of “Christabel”] be the effusions of Mr. Coleridge's waking faculties, what must be expected from the fragment of “Kubla Khan,” a production conceived, arranged, and finished in his sleep. He informs us that in the summer of the year 1797, being then in ill health, he had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition an anodyne had been prescribed, from...