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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello, this is Jack in 2025, reaching deep into the archives for this one, all the way back to July 2016 by special listener request. Apparently this one hit its target and left its mark. It's our episode on Coleridge, creativity and the notorious person from poor luck who interrupted Coleridge in mid poetic reverie. We're bringing this episode to you in its entirety without commercial interruption. I hope you enjoy it. Hello? One day in 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and retired to his room for a nap. When he awoke, he had in his head the remnants of a marvelous dream, a vivid train of images of the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan and his summer palace, Xanadu. The vision transformed itself into lines of poetry. But as he started writing it down, he was interrupted by a person from Porlock who arrived at Coleridge's cottage on business and stayed for an hour. When Coleridge returned to his work, the vision had been lost, and the fragmentary nature of the poem, Kubla Khan, has haunted its admirers ever since. The resentment has centered around the bumbling person from Porlock whose visit remains shrouded in mystery. The scholar Jonathan Livingston Lowes put it, if there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn and quartered, he wrote, it is the man on business from Porlock. Who was this person from Porlock, and what was he doing knocking on the door of Coleridge's cottage? How did Coleridge handle the interruption? And what did it mean for him and his art? And finally, what might we take from this vivid legend? Today, we're digging into a 220-year-old literary mystery today on the history of literature. Okay, today's a fun one. A rabbit hole I dove into, and I was surprised by what I found. There are layers upon layers upon layers to the story, and at the core, a beautiful poem and a truly compelling poet. Coleridge is. Well, there probably aren't five people like Coleridge in the history of literature. So brilliant and frustrating and tragic and doomed. A comet streaking through the heavens and flaming out before our eyes. We'll get to all that in a moment. First, though, I wanted to thank you all. I returned from my trip to Iceland, in Italy, to some wonderful comments and emails. I'm truly grateful for all the feedback, as always. Please help us out by rating and reviewing us on itunes. Just click the five stars there when you get the chance and tell your friends about the show, Facebook post us, and above all subscribe. That really helps the show. That's how this works. You get all this content for free and I get to keep giving you all this content for free. It's win win. You can also send me an email@jackwilsonauthormail.com that's J A C K E wilsonauthormail.com I'd love to hear from you. I'm getting some great suggestions too. Feel free to pass those along as well. We have some exciting episodes in the works, but I'm always happy to hear and respond to other ideas as well. And Iceland and Italy. Well, thank you for asking. That was marvelous. Hello to all my old friends in Italy and all my new friends in Iceland. And now I'm back, ready to jump back into the podcast. I'm tan and rested. Well, it's more like I'm all cut up from swimming in the Mediterranean where my family and I wound up on a beach filled with razor sharp rocks. But I'm rested. Okay, let's get started. Coleridge, Kublai Khan and the Person from Porlock let's start with the poet. I think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the Leonardo da Vinci of his era. The poetic equivalent. Anyway, he was one of the six great romantic poets. William Blake, William Wordsworth and Byron, Shelley and Keats and Coleridge. Each of these six are very different. They have different personalities, different life histories. But if you think of Wordsworth as kind of the Michelangelo of the group, the majestic, industrious one, Coleridge is the da Vinci, the brilliant, perhaps the most brilliant of them all, the one the others admire and look to. They're awestruck by his intellect. He's a leader, a pioneer, and they expect great things from him. The greatest. He's smarter and sharper and better than everyone in conversation and then in practice. When it comes to poetry, he doesn't always complete his projects. When you look at the span of his work, you see some brilliant and completed works. And you see a lot of false starts, too. Some misguided projects, some incompletes. Think of it this way. Imagine you're a teacher with a class full of smart kids, all working hard, all diligent, and you have to give them grades. You can't give everyone an A. You have to dole them out carefully. It's rare that you would give a student an A who only makes it to half the classes. A newspaper comes in at twice the length it should be and yet still isn't finished. In those circumstances, only true brilliance Warrants the A. He had that. And yet it's still a disappointment, a disappointing a. It's a strange position to be in. Only a few geniuses are transcendent enough to deserve that kind of treatment. Coleridge is one of them. The 16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari first put us onto the idea that da Vinci didn't complete anything. Michelangelo hated him for it, according to Vasari. Was he jealous? Perhaps. Perhaps. Think of the problems Michelangelo had to solve. He had to get huge blocks of marble transported from hundreds of miles away. It took him four years to paint the Sistine Chapel. And here's Leonardo sketching things, submitting proposals, astonishing everyone with his brilliance. Da Vinci is respected, admired, trained, treated as a great artist and thinker, and he was. But most of his projects got stalled. Somewhere along the way, he made a beautiful, brilliant statue of a horse in clay. It was the model for the statue that he meant to. That he intended to make. Everyone agreed that it was incredible, an achievement, and that was the one that set Michelangelo off, a clay statue. And da Vinci tried to cast it in bronze and somehow it didn't work. So he gave up, moved on to the next project. And Michelangelo, in Vasari's account, he says, well, who cares how good this clay statue was? It's not a real statue, it's not bronze, it's not going to last. Putting it into bronze, that's casting it in bronze is part of the deal. Here's. That's. From Michelangelo's perspective. The art world is saying da Vinci is as good as it gets. Michelangelo, he's a true genius. He's your peer, he's your equal. And Michelangelo says, how can you say that? Based on sketches and unfinished ideas and projects that don't come to fruition, and statues that will melt in the rain. In any case, that's kind of what we have with Coleridge. All this is context for our poem Kubla Khan. It's a strange poem, a wild vision full of vivid imagery. It has a true musicality to it, a marching cadence, a thumping feel, a kind of energy and breathlessness to it. And it takes strange twists and turns. It was unusual. Let's listen to a bit of it read by the actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
- [09:07]
Benedict Cumberbatch
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree where Alf the sacred ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round. And there were gardens bright with sinuous riles where blossomed Many an incense bearing tree. And here were forests ancient as the hills enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
- [09:39]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's pause there. That's the first stanza. It's okay if you didn't hear all the imagery. We'll unpack that in a minute. But this was. Just wanted you to hear some of the musicality of it. And the oral version was largely how it reached its audiences for years. A very small audience. Coleridge didn't publish the poem. In fact, even when he did publish it, he was somewhat dismissive of the poetry. He wrote a preface to the fragment, and the preface is extremely important to our story because it's where we hear about the person from Porlock. We'll get to that, too. But one of the striking parts of the preface is that Coleridge himself acknowledges the flaws in the poem as much as the strengths. He writes quote, the following fragment is here published as far as the author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits. The word poetic is italicized. It's probably for emphasis, but it's hard not to hear the tone of self abnegation here. Poetic merits, like air quotes around the word poetic poetry. Coleridge is saying, no, I know what poetry is. I know what flawless is. I have expectations for poetry, for my own as well as others, and this ain't that. Maybe we see here one of the reasons for Coleridge never finishing anything. It's hard when you're the smartest person in the room, the brilliant lover of poetry, the one who writes thrilling essays about Shakespeare and who probably sees more in Wordsworth's lines than Wordsworth himself does. That critical apparatus is a hard thing to shut off. It's hard to overcome. That kind of critical faculty makes you more ambitious. You don't start projects unless they're ambitious enough to reach the stratosphere. But it also makes you harder on your own work when it falls short. Others didn't care. Others only saw the rocket streaking into the sky and thought, well, this is fantastic. Who cares if you didn't finish? Who cares if you didn't make it to Mars? That rocket's on its way to space somewhere. Let's drop this rocket metaphor because I'm getting a little tangled up in it. Let's hear instead some contemporaries of coleridge Remember. For 16 years or so, Coleridge did nothing with this poem. Nothing official. He had the dream. He wrote the lines. He was interrupted. He didn't finish it. He revised it a little here and there. But ultimately, he gave up. Once in a while, he'd bring the poem out at parties. His friends knew about it, demanded to hear it, and he would read it aloud, and the friends went crazy. Charles Lamb said, coleridge has a vision of Kublai Khan he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven into my parlor while he sings or says it. Coleridge read the poem for Byron, and Byron demanded that he publish it. Leigh Hunt, who was in another room, later gave an account of the reading and the effect that it had on Byron. Byron staggered out of the room after Coleridge read Kubla Khan, highly struck with the poem and saying how wonderfully Coleridge talked, end quote. Hunt adds, this was the impression of everyone who heard Coleridge. What did they like so much? Why was this poem so different? It's a little hard to unpack now, 200 years later. All the poets who have come after Kublai Khan have heard it, absorbed it. The newness is not necessarily visible to us. It's a great poem. I still find plenty to admire. There's a ferocity to it that sticks with me and energy. But still, it's a 200-year-old poem. Think of a song like I Am the Walrus, which is now almost 50 years old, turns 50 next year. We're starting to lose the novelty of it. It's hard to hear it for the first time in context. What if you had been in the studio? What if you had heard it before it was released? You'd think about the possibilities, the strangeness. In 1964, John Lennon wrote A Hard Day's Night. When I get home to you I find the things that you do right. Those are the lyrics of that song. I've been working like a dog. I should be sleeping like a log. It's a perfect pop song. Catchy, irresistible. And then three years later, I Am the Walrus. Here are the lyrics. I am he as you are he as you are me. And we are all together. Doors are opening. Here's another. See how they run like pigs from a gun. See how they fly. I'm crying, sitting on a cornflake Waiting for the van to come. Corporation T shirt. Stupid bloody Tuesday man. You've been a naughty boy. You let your face grow long. Okay. There's a tradition here. It's not completely new sort of nonsense verse. It's Lewis Carroll. It's not like we don't have some precedence for it. But even so, if you were listening to that in 1967, with the music behind it, that and all the other developments of I Am the Walrus, you'd be thinking, whoa. And if you're a fellow songwriter, you'd think, boy, if they can pull this off, we can do anything. The whole world is opening up here. Moon in June, and lyrics like that, goodbye forever, we won't be tied to that. Expectations will be out the door. And then, along with the freedom that that would bring, you can just admire the imagery, the parade of imagery. Here's some more yellow matter. Custard dripping from a dead dog's eye. Crab, a locker fish wife, pornographic priestess. Boy, you been a naughty girl. You let your knickers down. I am the eggman. They are the eggman. I am the walrus. Incredible. I think that's something like what it would have been to be Byron listening to Kubla Khan. Here's the second stanza. But.
- [16:17]
Benedict Cumberbatch
Oh, that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill athwart a sedan cover. A savage place, as holy and enchanted as air beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover. And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing a mighty fountain momently was forced, amid whose swift half intermitted burst huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail or chaffy grain Beneath the thresher's flame amid these dancing rocks, at once and ever it flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the caverns measureless to man, and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. Amidst this tumult, kubler heard from far ancestral voices proffer prophesying war. The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure floated midway on the waves, where was heard the mingled measure from the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.
- [17:47]
Jack Wilson
Wow. That's the second stanza. I'll play the entire poem uninterrupted at the end of the program. So what were Coleridge's sources? How much of this was from him and from his fever dream? And how much did it was handed to him by the works that he was reading? There were actually two sources. One, his imagination, his poetic sensibility. And the other was Marco Polo's visit to Kublai Khan, which came to Coleridge via an old travel book that he was reading called Purchase, his pilgrimage. Purchase was the name of the author. So this is the excerpt from the travel book that Coleridge was reading before he Fell asleep. In Xanadu did Kublai Khan build a stately palace encompassing 16 miles of plain ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meadows, pleasant springs, delightful streams, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game. And in the midst thereof, a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place. Marco Polo had described this palace which he had seen in about 1275 AD he described the park with its fountains and rivers and brooks and beautiful meadows and wild animals. So Coleridge read this passage, this In Xanadu did Kublai Khan build a stately palace? And he goes into his nap and he wakes up with In Xanadu did Kubla Khan. A stately pleasure dome decree. Where elf the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Listen to that music. The vowels. A, oo, oo, ah, zan and du. Did Kubla Khan. The rhythm. The next lines flow or they rush forward headlong, just like a river. Where elf the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Well, you can hear it for yourself in Mr. Cumberbatch's reading. It entranced Byron and the imagery, too. What fascinates me are the images that Coleridge came up with, the ones that aren't in the travel book. Down to a sunless sea that's not in there. And the deep romantic chasm slanting down the green hill, covered with forest. A savage place, he says. Holy and enchanted. This is. This is Marco Polo. But it's more. It's more energized, electrified, suffused with something more than just travel description. As holy and enchanted as he says. And here with the. As, we're in full Coleridge territory, he's not repeating the travel description at all. So where's his mind? What will he come up with? What will he compare this with? Listen to this line. As holy and enchanted as air beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover. What? That's not Marco Polo. That is all Coleridge. You can just imagine Byron thinking, where is he getting this? As holy and enchanted as a woman under a waning moon. A woman haunting this holy and enchanted place by wailing for her demon. For her demon lover. Good God. Yellow matter, custard dripping from a dead dog's eye. Where does this stuff come from? Ah. Some of you may be saying, see the connection? John Lennon and Coleridge. Fantastic imagery. Comes from drugs, does it? Is this the opium talking? And for Lennon, of course, we think of Walrus as being an LSD inspired song is opium, the opium stupor where Coleridge gets the demon lover. The caves of ice, the dancing rocks, the sacred river meandering five miles with mazy motion before sinking in tumult to a lifeless ocean. And this next part I love after it, after it sinks to the lifeless ocean. And mid this tumult, Kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying war. What a leap that is. What a leap. We have the water. Coleridge loved water imagery. He was obsessed with fountains, rivers coursing bodies of water and seas. And here we have the water running for five miles in a mazy meandering motion and plummeting into the ocean. And suddenly from there, we jump back into Kublai Khan's head, where he hears ancestral voices prophesying war. That's not Marco Polo, that's Coleridge. And that is what it means to be a leader. That's a shift worthy of a great emperor. Can enclose a haunted and enchanted woods in 16 miles of wall and decree, A stately pleasure dome that can be moved from place to place. And then, even as the river runs five miles to the sea, you, the Emperor, will hear the world calling to you. The world of the past, the world of the future. For you are outside of time, your history itself, living history. You embody history because you are so powerful that your actions are timeless. They are immediate history. And you hear ancestral voices, voices that only you hear. And what do they tell you? War is on its way. Get ready. No wonder Byron was floored. The third stanza is a little strange. Might be tacked on. Some have thought it might be a separate poem that Coleridge added later. It's a real shift in meter and imagery. In any case, one might expect that that shift would impact Byron as well. Byron wrote in elaborate verse form, cranked them out one after another, verse after verse after verse, with astonishing fluidity. He didn't jazz around like this. He was creative, but not like this. He didn't shift gears this violently. Coleridge shifts gears, grinds the clutch, rips off the steering wheel and throws it out the window. And Byron, the great Lord Byron, staggers from the room. Publish that thing. HE GASPS. Coleridge says, what? It's a fragment. I don't care. Byron says, I invented this exchange. But I think that captures the general tenor of what happened. Coleridge had been sitting on the poem for 16 years, and Lord Byron finally persuaded him to publish it. Now, not all of his contemporaries loved the poem as a parenthetical Note I'll ask how many critics hated I Am the Walrus, wanted Johnny to go back to the hand clappers and toe tappers, maybe sing, twist and shout again. Hazlett, the formidable critic in Coleridge's time, hated the poem. So did T.S. eliot. Coming a little later. People who hate mess, who demand perfection, tend not to like Kublai Khan. They want to see something completed. And now we come to the person from Borlach. Why was Kublai Khan not completed? Because of this man. The story comes from Coleridge himself. In the preface to the poem, he writes, in the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset in Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence or words of the same substance. In Purchases, Pilgrimage. Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereunto, and thus 10 miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall. The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than 2, 2 to 300 lines, if that indeed can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking, he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved at this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet without the exception of some eight or 10 scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away, like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas, without the after restoration of the latter. And that's it, that's the story, he was called out by a person from Porlock. This description, this person from Porlock, he stands for something. He's the guy, the business person, the forces of commerce intruding, the mundane, the interrupter. He stands for all the stupid daily tasks that interrupt genius, art, dreams, the sensational what A what? A bumbler. And he's passed into legend, this unsuspecting guy from Porlock. An accountant, maybe a friendly banker, coming in to discuss Coleridge's accounts. He has passed into legend. Critics freely talk about killing the guy. He should be hanged, drawn and quartered. Would murder have been acceptable if we could get a finished Kubla Khan? Poets and authors will freely talk about the person from Porlock who disrupted their work. And we all nod. What a shame. Can't those bean counters stay away from artists? I'm not sure I'm as sympathetic. I feel a little bad for this guy from Porlock. When Saul Bellow heard that he won the Nobel Prize, he hung up the telephone and said to his kids, now do you see why I demanded silence all those years? I hear that story which Saul Bellow told, and I'm a big Saul Bellow fan. I'm grateful for his novels, but I hear that story and I think, they're kids. Kids make noise. Why don't you go somewhere else and work? And I say to Coleridge, a person from Porlock came. Ignore him. Stay in your reverie. What could be so important that you need to interrupt yourself, your work, and spend an hour on this business? Well, De Quincey, Coleridge's contemporary, had an idea of who the person was. De Quincey, of course, is a famous opium addict like Coleridge. And he said, yeah, I knew who the person from Porlock was. Coleridge was getting Zopium from him. His name was Dr. Jonathan Depths. That's who the person was. That's the business he was there on. Not everyone agrees with this, but think about that for a minute. Coleridge says the man stayed for an hour. What would that mean if it was the doctor who was prescribing Coleridge opium? An hour? That's not somebody just dropping off the laudanum. That's not just Coleridge handing over some cash. That's a discussion. And what would they have to discuss? Coleridge talking about his experiences while taking the drugs. We know how addicts are. Maybe he was describing his states of mind, his need. Maybe he was demanding, maybe begging, maybe lying a little, maybe saying whatever he needs to minimizing the extent of his addiction. Is this what happened? We don't know. There's a ring of truth to it. Maybe that he would have interrupted himself to take a meeting with his doctor. Coleridge, we know, is hiding his addiction. We see that in the preface. In consequence of a slight indisposition, he says an anodyne was prescribed that's much more innocuous than what the truth was. Here's what he says. Elsewhere, we have another account. Coleridge wrote out a handwritten copy of Kublai Khan. On the back of it, he wrote some notes about the composition of the poem. This version has survived. And in this, on the back of the poem, Coleridge writes this fragment with a good deal more not recoverable. Composed in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium taken to check a dysentery at a farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile from Cullbone Church, in the fall of the year 1797. End quote in the publication. In the preface. He sounds like a dreamer, someone who reads works of lore, falls asleep, wakes up with an entire 200 to 300 lines of poetry in his mind all laid out. The notes we have on the handwritten version. He sounds like someone who is more reliant on opium, who has convinced himself that opium unlocks something creative, some potential, or it gives him something fantastic. He sounds like someone trying to harness that power without being demolished by it. I took two grains of opium, gives us the precise amount it sort of worked. Mark that down. Here's Coleridge in a letter to a friend, writing around the same time of the composition of Kubla Khan. I should much wish, like the Indian Vishnatho, float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes just to know I was going to sleep a million years more. Doesn't this sound like an opium addict describing the pleasures, wishing for more, wants to sleep for a million years, wake up for a few minutes and go to sleep for a million years more. Floating about an infinite ocean, isn't that someone who wishes that his dreams were real and had no aftermath, no negative consequences? Coleridge goes on, I can at times feel strong the beauties you describe in themselves and form themselves. But more frequently, all things appear little, all the knowledge that can be acquired. Child's play. The universe itself. What an immense heap of little things. My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty. That's Coleridge. That's Coleridge. It's that yearning for the feeling, the aching to behold something great, to behold it and know it. Closest thing he can think of. Rocks, waterfalls, mountains, caverns. Another poet might have wanted to be Kublai Khan, living in that pleasure dome, in that splendor. Coleridge wanted the power to imagine it. Imagination was everything to Coleridge. His great friend, his spiritual partner, his creative soulmate was Wordsworth. The two of them had a period of creative rivalry and collaboration, probably unmatched until that fateful day when John met Paul at the village fete. Here was a poet, Wordsworth, who shared Coleridge's ambitions and ideas and approach, and who matched Coleridge's talents with a genius of his own. Coleridge. As our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry. The power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. End quote. The first point is Wordsworthian. The second is all Coleridge. The modifying colors of imagination. So we have two theories so far about the person from Porlock. The first one is that we accept Coleridge at his word. It's a man on business. That's the commonly accepted theory. Some bumbler arriving with a contract to sign or a loan to discuss or something. The second is that it's his doctor. Coleridge has been a little coy about who it really is. This theory is a little sad, Suggests that Coleridge took the meeting because of his addiction. He needed to discuss his addiction with his doctor. He needed the drugs. Maybe they were fueling his art. Either they actually were, or he believed that they were. But in any case, they were also harming his body and the rest of his life, as addictive narcotics tend to do. There's a third theory. It has been advanced. The person from Porlock didn't exist. Hmm. Stevie Smith, the poet, believed this theory. The truth is, she said, I think Coleridge was already stuck. In other words, he didn't finish. He didn't finish Kublai Khan. Just like so many other projects. And so somewhat embarrassed, knowing that all he had was a fragment, he invented. The person from Porlock. Let's take a look at this theory. We know Coleridge is capable of shading the truth. We've already seen it in the preface. He hides the fact of his opium addiction. And he writes, somewhat improbably, that he had the vision of 2 to 300 lines. Do we really believe that? Do we really believe that? How could he know? This isn't like a painting where you might see the entire picture at once, take it all in in a single glance. Poetry unfolds line by line, in order. It's like a. It's like a musical composition if you start hearing a melody. Let's say Beethoven fell asleep and woke up with a sonata in his mind. Maybe he starts to hum it and writes it down. Someone knocks on the door. Maybe it's the person from Porlock traveling to Vienna has some business with Beethoven as well. Anyway, Beethoven gets interrupted. He's only hummed a few minutes. He's only managed to get that much down. Would we believe him if he said that the full sonata was in his mind and it would have been 40 or 45 minutes long? What if the few minutes we have seem to run out of steam at the end? What if they take a sharp swerve? If they look like he may have painted himself into a corner, would we blame the interruption? Or would we maybe think that Beethoven might be trying to put one over on us? Coleridge could be self serving here, as Stevie Smith suggests. In the preface, Coleridge tells us his source of inspiration. He quotes the line from Purchase's Pilgrimage as best as he remembers what he gives. As the line is here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereunto, and thus 10 miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall. That's the quote that Coleridge gives. Is that right? Coleridge says that's the sentence or words of the same substance. But couldn't he have looked it up? Or maybe he didn't want to, because here's the actual first phrase in the actual book. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan. It's not hear the Khan Khubla. Coleridge did go on to improve the rest of the line, but not those first five words. Those he lifted whole from the travel book. That's what kicks off his marvelous poem in Xanadud Kublai Khan. It's a great phrase. Those words are awesome. But Coleridge didn't write them. He found them. Lets give him credit. He recognized it. He built a poem around it. But they were not his. Did he conveniently forget how much he had borrowed from the travel book? Could he maybe not bring himself to highlight the fact that the marvelous beginning was already there, just quietly living in a lowly travel book? That they were not his words. Here's a less speculative example of Coleridge's tendency toward prevarication. In chapter 13 of his Biographia Literaria, his chapter on imagination, he interrupts the flow of his thoughts with a letter from a friend. He has a full head of steam going. He's trying out his thoughts on imagination. He's developing his theories, when suddenly he stops short, breaks the page with some asterisks, and says, thus far, had the work been transcribed for the press? When I received the following letter from a friend. And then he gives us a letter that comments on the ideas in the chapter thus far, praising the chapter, offering some criticism of it, giving some further ideas. Later, Coleridge acknowledged that he himself had written. This letter did not come from a friend. He'd written a letter. It was his way of getting himself out of a jam, to shift gears in midstream and express some other ideas. That's fine, it's not a literary crime. But listen to how he sells us on this letter. I received the following letter from a friend whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere. He's talking about himself. After the letter, Coleridge, back in his own voice, says, quote, in consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume, end quote. The letter is his excuse. This letter is his version of saying, I couldn't quite get the horse bronzed, didn't quite finish the statue. But here, take a look at the clay model for it. See what I was going to do. You can imagine the bronze part and Coleridge's Casey saying, here, yes, this is a fragment for Kubla Khan. I acknowledge that it's a psychological curiosity more than an actual poem, but, hey, there was a person from Porlock. One wonders. As a side note, the phrase psychological curiosity referring to it's a euphemism for opium. One imagines presenting it as the results of his fever dream. Anyway, the person from Porlock. Is it so hard to imagine that the person didn't exist and that it's Coleridge's excuse? He ran out of poetic fever, the dream died. Or maybe he got hungry and ate lunch. Or maybe Wordsworth turned up. That's another theory. People have looked at the movements of people, the known visitors to the farmhouse. They thought maybe it was Wordsworth who had arrived, stayed for an hour. Coleridge later didn't want to name him, blame him for not finishing the poem. Maybe it wasn't a visitor at all. Maybe Coleridge's hand cramped. Maybe the right state of mind wore off as the effects of the drug wore off. He lost the vision before he could get it all down. Or maybe he took a fresh dose of Opium fell back asleep. Coleridge describes it as a stone being tossed into a stream, fragmenting the reflections on the surface. Who knows what the stone was? No one else was there. And we can't trust Coleridge. His wife had this reaction to the news that the poem was going to be. Oh. Oh, when will he ever give his friends anything but pain? He has been so unwise to publish his fragment of Kubla Khan. We were all sadly vexed by the news. Sadly vexed. More disappointment. Another clay horse, Mr. Da Vinci. Sixteen years with this poem, with this fragment. A brilliant poetic mind in possession of a fragment, of a poem that everyone loves. Couldn't he have finished the thing? Couldn't he have rolled up his shirt sleeves, gotten to work? Kingsley Amis thinks poets could do that. He wasn't referring specifically to Coleridge, but he had a view of a writer as someone who did the job of writing. If you were asked to write a poem for a public event and you took on the work, you didn't sit around, wait for inspiration to strike, you sat down and wrote it. That was your job. That's what writers do. Lord Byron was dismissive of the idea that inspiration came and went. Or at least I think he was. In his great poem, Don Juan or Don Juan, there's a part where he invoked the muse. Hail Muse, etc. He wrote. That's in the poem. Hail Muse, etc. Who needs a muse? That's how I interpret that line. Coleridge was different. Coleridge could revise in the cold light of day. It's the old F. Scott Fitzgerald maxim. You can write drunk, but you'd better revise sober. Coleridge's revisions of Kubla Khan show how sharp he was. Listen to this revision, first version. So twice six miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were compassed round. That gets changed too. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round. Much better. Very small changes, very simple. He changed six miles to five miles and compassed to girdled much more. The result is much more mellifluous. Listen again, first version. So twice six miles of fertile ground. So twice five miles of fertile ground. And so twice six miles. You trip over the S's in that. So twice five miles of fertile ground. Twice five. It's much easier to say. And the vowels line up. Twice five miles. The effect is better. Twice five miles. Twice six miles. Twice five miles is better. Right, here's another revision. First from forth. This chasm with hideous turmoil, seething that gets changed to and from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil, seething again. The changes are simple. Changed from, forth to and from. But the line is better in hideous turmoil. What is hideous turmoil, ceaseless turmoil. It's better. Matches up with ceaseless, seething. Ceaseless turmoil, seething. Hideous turmoil, seething. It's rocky crags. Ceaseless turmoil, seething. You hear the difference, right? It's better. Coleridge is razor sharp when he's editing. He was a poet. He knew what he was doing. And he was steeped in poetry. Critics have seen connections in Kubla Khan to poems by Milton, Samuel Johnson, Chatterton, a dozen others, their resonances with Shakespeare and the Bible. He may have been dreamy with opium at that particular moment, but he was also dreamy with poetry. That dream was a dream that didn't wear off for Coleridge. He was a poet, a true poet, as equipped as any person who has ever walked the earth. So why couldn't he just go in and rattle off some new lines? Roll up his sleeves, Please. His wife and his friends, all those loved ones who are sadly vexed when he doesn't finish. Why not make them happy? Unvex them? He knew the poem was unfinished. He knew it fed into his reputation, the criticism of him. His reputation as brilliant but flawed, disappointing. He knew that Wordsworth was accomplishing things, completing projects where Coleridge only had brilliant beginnings, half finished, wayward disappointments. Here's the key. Here's where we see the key to it all, and the person from Porlock, as a mere interrupter, fades in importance. We're getting close to the end of our mystery now. Of course, Coleridge could have finished out the poem, whatever the interruption. He could have drafted lines. He could have put his mind to it, come up with new lines, new images. It might have been more pedestrian, not quite as fantastical, not quite as true to the original vision he had. But he could have done it. He could have made them passable. The poem might not have been perfect, but it would have been complete. Earlier, I suggested that it may have been a love of perfection that made him, like Da Vinci, give up halfway. The knowledge of an imperfection would kill the idea. It was better in their mind, in their imagination, as a flawless work of art, than in the actual execution, where a flaw might be introduced and forever mar the thing. But for Coleridge, at least, I think there's something different at play here. It's his respect for imagination, with a capital I, as he himself would write it. Coleridge believed in the power of unity, the unified imagination, the act of Creation, the inspired, unified burst of imagination. Art for him was organic. It grew, it came out of something and lived as a whole. It was like a dream, an uninterrupted dream. That was the effect on the reader. And for Coleridge, at least, it was the effect that originated with the experience of the Creator. We see this over and over in his writings, from his poetry to his letters, to his essays, to his lectures on Shakespeare, his reverence for the act of imagination. Art is organic in Coleridge's view. It germinates, it's self enclosed. It's not cobbled together or constructed, grows naturally. You don't roll up your sleeves and crank out poetry like a workman at a bench. You close your eyes and catch lightning and try to steer it toward the page. You grab those modified colors as best you can, while you can. It's a great literary tradition. It's not Kingsley amos or Paul McCartney who had a similar view of what a composer should do. That was McCartney. You want a ballad? Here you go. James Bond theme. Here it is. A song for Frank Sinatra duet, an oratorio. I should be able to handle any of this because I'm calling myself a composer. After all, that's fine. That's art. Applied genius. Workman, like genius. It's not an oxymoron. Michelangelo lying on his back for four years painting away. That's lightning. That's an expression of genius. And it's also a lot of hard, hard work. The hard work doesn't subtract from the quality of the result. But it's not Coleridge's way. Coleridge is like the jazz musician improvising. Or the stand up comedian who can only work before a live audience and can't script his jokes beforehand. The method actor who can't recreate the live performance. It sounds incongruous, writing as a live performance. Because we're so used to the idea of a writer like James Joyce spending a day on a single sentence, or Raymond Carver saying, you edit a short story until you find yourself putting in the commas that you had just taken out. No, this is writing like the beats viewed. Writing first thought, best thought. It's the writer swinging on the trapeze. We can see why he's drawn to opium. The fever dreams of opium are grasps at this transcendence, at the feel, imagination at its full power. Paul McCartney tried LSD too. He didn't like it. He got out of his head. Well, he didn't. He didn't want to be out of his head. He thought what if I don't come back? But Paul said that for John, that was part of the appeal. Maybe I won't come back. He loved the idea. He wanted his mind expanded. He couldn't get enough of being outside of his mind. Paul had a dream and woke up with a song. And the song was yesterday. That's. That's so Paul Coleridge could revise with the best of them, could apply his critical faculty to that. But for the new lines, the original lines, the ones that came in a burst of inspiration, it didn't work for him. He didn't complete Kubla Khan, not because he didn't want to, or not just because he didn't want to, but because he didn't believe it was right to try. Going back was inconsistent with his vision of imagination. He knew the poem would suffer if he went back. He knew it wouldn't have the same life and energy, that it would be different, lumpy, misshapen. And that wasn't good enough. There was no point to trying to recapture the original magic. After Porlock, after the disruption, whoever or whatever it was, the moment was gone. But this is not the tragedy it seems to be. It's not Hemingway's lawsuit case full of stories. It's not Bakhtin's brilliant works of criticism rolled up into cigarette papers and smoked into oblivion during a time of deprivation. It's a testament to Coleridge. It's more than a psychological curiosity. Kubla Khan is more than a fragment of a potentially brilliant work. It's an embodiment of Coleridge's life's work. It's a testament to his real subject, the great passion of his life. Poetic imagination is there in the preface and is there in the poem. Imagination is sensational. Imagination is supreme. Imagination is sublime. The person from Porlock is not an unfortunate interrupter. And it's not Coleridge's pathetic attempt to excuse yet another failure. The person from Porlock is a key, a window into Coleridge, a statement of his beliefs, a vivid example of what it means to be an artist in Coleridge's view. Let's say Coleridge wrote a letter or an essay in which he said, imagination is so central and so fragile that if it is interrupted, one may never recover the state of mind necessary to complete the composition successfully. If that were stated, would we remember it? Would we believe him? Would we quote it as literary truth? The preface and the poem work together. They are two sides of the same individual. The poet of the preface is a dreamer who must write. The poet of the poem is a dreamer. In the middle of a vision, both of them lose inspiration. The poet of the poem wants to recover the vision. The poet of the preface tells us that visions are unrecoverable. The dream ends. The dream lasts as long as it does. Coleridge wants it to last a million years. He tells us, friend, but it ends. The dream always ends. It's John's song, too. Here's the end of his song. God, remember the lyrics from that song. I was the walrus, but now I'm John. The dream is over. We aren't the masters of imagination any more than we're the masters of art. We're the masters of life. We may think we are, but we're not. We're not the emperors. Even an emperor is not truly an emperor. Not when we think of imagination and creativity and art and life. In those realms, we have no mastery. We're all slaves, subservient to forces larger than us. That's the point. And the person from Porlock is not our enemy, blocking us from some poetic truth. He's our guide, helping us to see it. That's it for this episode of the History of Literature. Who interrupts me? Sometimes it's an actual person. Usually a hungry kid looking for breakfast. But that's okay. That's my job. Parent pancake maker interrupting the fever dream of a podcast episode. I've never been to Porlock. Sounds like a nice little town. It's about 1400 people. There's two great literary legends there. One we've discussed for the past hour. The other legend is that it's near where Jesus may have landed during a trip. Did you know that Jesus took a trip to England? Chalk it up to unconfirmed rumors. William Blake, anyway, was excited by the prospect. In his poem Milton, he wrote, and did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountain screen? And was the holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures scene? Here's a thought. Maybe the person from Porlock was Jesus. Calling Coleridge out, one imagines that our Savior might have had a bit of business to discuss with Mr. Coleridge. A bit of business, indeed. Speaking of business, you can find more episodes on itunes and Stitcher or by visiting historyofliterature.com or jackwilson.com that's J A C K E wilson.com we're becoming more active on Facebook. You can find us at the History of Literature podcast page. The best way to get all your History of Literature needs met is to subscribe. And while you're there, Please remember to rate us if you have the time and write a review if you have a little more time. These things really help us out. Thank you again for being a part of this journey. We'll have a full rendition of Kubla Khan coming up after the music. This one is read by Mr. David Olney, artist and performer. I'm Jack Wilson. As always, thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [63:41]
David Olney
And Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree where alf the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round. And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed many an incense bearing tree. And here were forests ancient as the hills and folding sunny spots of greenery. But O that deep romantic chasm which slanted down a green hill athwart a cedarn cover a savage place as holy and enchanted as e'er been. The waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover. And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething as if this earth and fast thick pants were breathing a mighty fountain momently was forced, amid whose swift half intermittent burst huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail or chatty grain. Beneath the thresher's flail amid these dancing rocks at once endeavor it flung up momently the sacred river five miles meandering with a mazy motion through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the caverns measureless to man and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. And from this tumult Kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying war. The shadow of the dome of pleasure floated midway on the waves, where was heard the mingled measure from the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of red of ice. A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice. A damsel with a dulcimer. In a vision once I saw it was an Abyssinian maid, and on her dulcimer she played singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me her symphony and song to such a deep delight would win me that with music loud and long I would build that dome air, that sunny dome, those caves of ice. And all who heard should see them there and all should cry, Beware, Beware his flashing eyes, his floating hair Weave a circle round him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread. For he on honey dew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise.