SOURCE: Levy, Martin J. “Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Kubla Khan.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 77 (January 1992): 159-66.

In the following essay, Levy explores Coleridge's relationship to Mary Robinson and considers why he showed her Kubla Khan before it was published. The critic examines both authors' use of opium as a possible reason for Robinson's early familiarity with the poem.

One of the enduring mysteries of Coleridge scholarship is the nature of Mary Robinson's connection with Kubla Khan. Scholars have long known that it is in her ode ‘Mrs Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’ that we find the first published references to the poem but they do not know why he allowed her to see it.¹ Even Elisabeth Schneider, who published a virtually encyclopaedic study of the poem in 1953 in which Robinson was several times mentioned, did not address the problem of purpose. Though, as we shall see, she did hint...