as the vision of a poet inspired by the music of a mysterious maiden, evokes in the reader an "organic response" (through the collective unconscious) to these atavistic emotional archetypes. Subsequent Jungian critics have undertaken (with various degrees of success) to extend Bodkin's thesis -- by developing the implications of the Edenic archetype, by invoking Plato's doctrine of anamnesis or recollection, and by analysing Kubla Khan as a descriptive illustration of Jung's "individuation process". There are, too, less respectably, some extreme Jungian (or pseudo-Jungian) interpretations: for example, Robert Fleissner's catachrestic argument for Kubla Khan as an "integrationist" poem. The summary of criticism in the preceding pages has not, of course, exhausted the diversity of approaches to Kubla Khan. It has also been read as a landscape-poemand as a poetical day-dream; there are provocative interpretations of it as a political statement contrasting the profane power of the state with the sacred power of the poet; and there are theological readings -- quite important ones, in fact -- which explore the visionary and apocalyptic theme of fallen man's yearning to recover the lost Paradise. What, then, shall we say of Kubla Khan? -- that it has too much meaning, or too many meanings, or (perhaps) no meaning at all? Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est: critics dispute, and the case is still before the courts (Horace, Ars Poetica, 78). In the circumstances, I will not presume to render a verdict, but merely to offer some advice. Literary criticism has more and more become a science of solutions. When a lurking mystery is discovered, analytical floodlights are trained upon it to dispel the shadows and open its dark recesses. But Kubla Khan, as Charles Lamb acutely perceived, is an owl that won't bear daylight. We must learn to take the poem on its own terms and, instead of attempting to salvage it by reducin...
