statement of frustration"? Scholarly disagreements such as these can be multiplied almost endlessly. In fact, the symbolic valency of virtually every image in the poem -- the sacred river Alph, the substance and shadow of Kubla's pleasure-dome, the ancestral voices prophesying war, and so on -- has proved a source of unresolved (and unresolvable) debate; and it is probably no exaggeration to say that no single interpretation of Kubla Khan has ever wholly satisfied anyone except the person who proposed it. Despite the popularity of the view that Kubla Khan is a poem about poetry, then, there is no consensus about just what is being said about the poetic process.Coleridge’s own poetic theoryAnother approach to Kubla Khan, which overlaps significantly with readings of it as a symbolic statement about poetry, centres on the use of Coleridge's own poetic theory in an effort to illuminate the poem. Four Coleridgean dicta are frequently invoked: pleasure, genius, the reconciliation of opposites, and fancy / imagination. Such interpretations, however, while often instructive, are not without their problems. For example, although it is often pointed out that the imagery of Kubla Khan contains numerous "oppositions" (Kubla's cultivated gardens set against a savage romantic chasm, the sunny dome that contains caves of ice, etc.), it is by no means clear that the poem embodies the Coleridgean doctrine of the reconciliation of opposites. Indeed, as Elisabeth Schneider has said, there is ample reason to insist that such reconciliation is avoided and that, instead, the poem illustrates the very spirit of ambiguity and oscillation. Even clearer, perhaps, as an illustration of the problems encountered in applying Coleridgean theory to Kubla Khan is the diversity in interpretations of the poem as an embodiment of the fancy/imagination distinction. George Watson asserts dogmatically that Kubla Khan is "about two kinds of poem" and th...
