ies taken over so many months seduced him unwittingly into slavery to the drug. And his life between 1801 and 1806 (when he returned from Malta) is a somber illustration of a growing and, finally, a hopeless bondage to opium.By the time he realized he was addicted, however, it was too late. He consulted a variety of physicians; he attempted more than once (with nearly fatal results) to break off his use of opium all at once; and, at last, in 1816, when he submitted his case to James Gillman (in whose house he was to spend the rest of his life), he was able to control his habit and reduce his doses, although he was never able to emancipate himself entirely.But to return to the 1790s: what can we say about Coleridge's experience of opium at the time of composing Kubla Khan? The effects produced by opium in the early stages were soothing and seductive: "Laudanum", he wrote his brother George in March 1798 (in terms which recall the imagery of Kubla Khan), "gave me repose, not sleep: but YOU, I believe, know how divine that repose is -- what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains, & flowers & trees, in the very heart of a waste of Sands!" (CL, i 394). Opium, it seems (to cite an earlier letter, of October 1797, which may well be describing a drug experience), tended to "raise & spiritualize" his intellect, so that he could, like the Indian Vishnu, "float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos" (CL, i 350). Such an experience and such a mood are reflected in Kubla Khan. As we know from the Crewe endnote, Coleridge took "two grains of Opium" before he wrote Kubla Khan; and this fact naturally raises the issue of the drug's effect on the poet's creative imagination. Early critics, guided by Coleridge's statements in the 1816 Preface, assumed that there was a direct and immediate correlation between opium and imagination. In 1897 J.M. Robertson could not bring himself to doubt that "the sp...
