] failure in poetry and life to the logorrhea of Kubla Khan". A third problem with Freudian analysis is that, in general, it is more interested in the poet than in the poem and, in addition, often accords the 1816 Preface a stature at least equal to that of Kubla Khan itself. As with the source-studies examined in the previous section, Freudian readings use the poem largely as a pretext for exploring extrapoetic matters: the roads of psychological criticism customarily lead away from Xanadu into the charted and uncharted realms of the poet's biography and subconscious psychosexual history. Jungian interpretations Unlike the Freudians, who stress the psychological particularity of Kubla Khan, Jungian critics focus on the way in which the poem draws upon and perpetuates traditional images in which "the age-long memoried self" is repeatedly embodied. Often the results of such an approach are illuminating and useful -- largely because Jungian criticism, when it resists the reductivist temptation to explain away images with psychological tags, allows for ambiguities and the existence of half-seen truths. As Kathleen Raine points out in an engaging essay, Kubla Khan was "written in that exaltation of wonder which invariably accompanies moments of insight into the mystery upon whose surface we live".The earliest (and still probably the best) Jungian interpretation is found in Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934). Her argument, in essence, is that Kubla's pleasant gardens and the forbidding caverns under them correspond "in some degree to the traditional ideas of Paradise and Hades": "the image of the watered garden and the mountain height show some persistent affinity [in Western literature as a whole] with the desire and imaginative enjoyment of supreme well-being, or divine bliss, while the cavern depth appears as the objectification of an imaginative fear". In Kubla Khan the heaven-hell pattern, presented ...
