ritics who have written about it. Kubla Khan, a poem about poetic processGenerally speaking, the most popular view by far is that Kubla Khan is concerned with the poetic process itself. "What is Kubla Khan about? This is, or ought to be, an established fact of criticism: Kubla Khan is a poem about poetry".On this reading, the Tartar prince Kubla Khan, who causes a pleasure-dome and elaborate gardens to be constructed in Xanadu, is a type of the artist, whose glorious creation, as the ancestral voices from the deep caverns warn, is a precariously balanced reconciliation of the natural and the artificial. The dream of Xanadu itself is an inspired vision which expresses dramatically the very nature of vision: the fountain that throws up its waters from an underground ocean and so gives birth to the sacred river that meanders five miles through Kubla's hortus conclusus before sinking again into the subterraneous depths images the sudden eruption of the subconscious into the realm of the conscious mind and its eventual inevitable recession back into the deep well of the unconscious. The artist's purpose is to capture such visions in words, but in attempting to do so he encounters two serious difficulties: first, language is an inadequate medium that permits only an approximation of the visions it is used to record, and, second, the visions themselves, by the time the poet comes to set them down, have faded into the light of common day and must be reconstructed from memory. Between the conception and the execution falls the shadow. Coleridge confronts these problems directly in lines 37-54 (the section beginning with the Abyssinian maid), where he enters the poem as lyric poet in propria persona. The vision of Kubla's Xanadu is replaced by that of a damsel singing of Mount Abora -- an experience more auditory than visual and therefore less susceptible of description by mere words. Moreover, it involves in an equivocal wa...
