at "there is no need to resist the conclusion" that Coleridge's intention was to contrast the fanciful (and therefore inferior) fixities and definites of Kubla's ornately palpable Xanadu (lines 1-36) with a programme of ideal imaginative creation (lines 37-54) that is hinted at but not actually realised in the poem as we have it. For Alan Purves, however, Kubla Khan and Xanadu symbolise not Fancy but the Primary Imagination, while the inspired poet in the last section symbolises the Secondary or poetic Imagination And Irene Chayes offers yet another possible reading: the opening description of Kubla's palace and gardens (lines 1-11) illustrates the "work of the arranging and ornamenting fancy"; the account of the erupting fountain and the course of the sacred river (lines 12-36) represents the "autonomous and unconscious" operation of imagination -- the fountain corresponding to Primary Imagination and the river to Secondary Imagination; and the final section, dealing with the Abyssinian maid and the inspired poet (lines 37-54), develops the symbolic representation of imagination by showing it to be, in its highest form, a willed and conscious activity: "The last stanza . . . is concerned with a new creative process, governed by a purposive will, which would replace and correct the earlier process, autonomous and unconscious, or partially conscious, that was at work in the dream-vision". Each of these interpretations, while compelling in its way, is ultimately unsatisfactory -- not because it is "wrong", but rather because it imposes too rigorously schematic a meaning on the poem and presupposes a theoretical precision beyond Coleridge's grasp in 1797. Since Kubla Khan was composed well before Coleridge had worked out, even in outline, the major tenets of his critical theory, it is impossible to see how it can properly be interpreted as an illustration and symbolic embodiment of critical principles that had not yet been formul...
