velation of personal fantasies and repressed, usually erotic, urges; but there is little agreement about the precise nature of these subliminal drives. Douglas Angus argues that the poem illustrates a psychoneurotic pattern of narcissism that reflects Coleridge's abnormal need for love and sympathy; Eugene Sloane, however, is convinced that "Kubla Khan is an elaborate development of a birth dream", expressing an unconscious desire to return to the warmth and security of the womb (the hair in line 50, for example, is "floating" in amniotic fluid); and Gerald Enscoe finds the core of the poem's meaning in the unresolved struggle between "two conflicting attitudes toward the subject of erotic feeling", i.e. the "attitude . . . that the sexual impulse is to be confined within a controlled system" is opposed to "the anarchistic belief that the erotic neither should nor can be subjected to such control".Still other readers prefer to follow Robert Graves by concentrating on what the poem implies about Coleridge's experience with opium: James Bramwell reads Kubla Khan as "a dream-fable representing [Coleridge's] conscience in the act of casting him out, spiritually and bodily, from the paradise of his opium paradise"; and Eli Marcovitz, who sets out to "treat [the poem] as we would a dream in our clinical practice", confidently concludes that Kubla Khan is "almost a chart of the psychosexual history" of a personality ineluctably embarked on the road to addiction: It depicts the life of the poet -- his infancy and early childhood, the pleasures and deprivations of the oral period, the stimulation and dread of his oedipal period, the reaction to the death of his father at nine, the fear of incest and genitality with the regression to passive-femininity and orality, and the attempt to cope with his life's problems by the appeal to the muse and to opium.Who would have supposed, without guidance, that so much repressed meaning was compressed in...
