ated.This is not to say, of course, that the poem is unrelated to the theory: it is only to insist that Kubla Khan, rather than being a material anticipation of later critical precepts, is a part of the process that leads eventually to the development and articulation of those ideas in a systematic way. And it is not surprising, therefore, that the "meaning" of the poem should be obscure and ambiguous -- for Kubla Khan records an early, perhaps largely unconscious, exploration of critical perceptions united only loosely in an inchoate theory of literature.Freudian Analysis A poem such as Kubla Khan -- so provokingly enigmatic and so deliciously suggestive -- also provides an irresistibly fertile ground for psychological speculation, especially on the part of Freudian critics. When Coleridge called the poem a "psychological curiosity" in his 1816 Preface and confessed that Kubla Khan was the record of an actual dream, he unwittingly opened wide the door to analysts anxious to expound the latent psychological implications of his symphony and song. One of the earliest of the Freudian readings was offered in 1924 by Robert Graves, who proposed that Kubla Khan expressed Coleridge's subconscious determination "to shun the mazy complications of life by retreating to a bower of poetry, solitude and opium" -- a serene refuge beyond the bitter reproaches of Mrs Coleridge (the woman who is wailing for her demon lover) and almost beyond the gloomy prophecies of addiction uttered by the "ancestral voices" of Lamb and Charles Lloyd. By comparison with recent Freudian interpretations, this is pretty tame stuff. Nevertheless, it was enough to alert I.A. Richards almost immediately to the chilling possibilities of such an approach: "The reader acquainted with current methods of [psychological] analysis", he warned, "can imagine the results of a thorough going Freudian onslaught".In general, the Freudians treat Kubla Khan as an unconscious re...
