SOURCE: Lowes, John Livingston. “The Sleeping Images.” In The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, pp. 356-402. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.

In the following excerpt from his book-length study of “Kubla Khan,” Lowes accepts Coleridge's contention that the poem was the product of an unconscious vision, and explicates the work's dreamlike imagery using evidence of the poet's reading.

Coleridge's own account of the genesis of ‘Kubla Khan’ is as follows. It was first published in 1816, with the poem. [Coleridge later dreamed another poem—this time a quatrain. For his account of it see the Notes.¹]

In the summer of 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in...