t everything about poetry is wholly explicable -- especially in such poems as Kubla Khan, where "meaning" is not a formulated idea and is, at best, only adumbrated through oblique and suggestive imagery. It may well be that more is meant in Kubla Khan than meets the ear, but it is by no means easy to determine precisely what that meaning might be. And the impulse of literary critical professionalism to demystify, to reduce imaginative to merely rational statements, results too often in a kind of inversion of the alchemist's dream: it debases gold into lead by transforming complex symbols into simple allegories. The first and, for over a hundred years, almost the only reader to insist on the intelligibility and coherence of Kubla Khan was Shelley's novel-writing friend, Thomas Love Peacock: "there are", he declared in 1818, "very few specimens of lyrical poetry so plain, so consistent, so completely simplex et Unum from first to last". Perhaps wisely, Peacock concluded his fragmentary essay with these words, thereby sparing himself the onerous task of explaining the consistency and meaning of so plain a poem as Kubla Khan. More recent commentators, however, have been much bolder. In the criticism of the last fifty years one may distinguish, broadly, four major approaches to Kubla Khan:(1)interpretations of it as a poem about the poetic process(2)readings of it as an exemplification of aspects of Coleridgean aesthetic theory(3)Freudian analyses, and (4)Jungian interpretations.While recent critics concur in finding a symbolic substructure in Kubla Khan, there is little agreement among them as to how that symbolism should be interpreted. Critical approaches usually overlap, and individual critics often draw upon two, three or even all four of the above methods in formulating their particular explication of the poem's symbolic infrastructure. There are, in short, as many different interpretations of Kubla Khan as there are c...
