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Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": A New Historicist Study / ‫ ﺩﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﻣن‬:‫ﻗﺼيدﺓ " ﻗﺒﻼﻱ خاﻥ " لﻜﻮلﺮيدﺝ‬
‫ﻣنﻈﻮﺭ ﺍلﺘﺄﺭيخانيﺔ ﺍلجديدﺓ‬

Author(s): Jalal Uddin Khan and ‫جلال الدين خان‬
Source: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2012, No. 32, The Imaginary and the
Documentary: Cultural Studies in Literature, History, and the Arts / :‫ﺍلﺘخييلي ﻭﺍلﻮﺛاﺋﻘي‬
‫&ﺩﺭﺍﺳاﺕ ﺛﻘاﻓيﺔ ﻓي ﺍﻷﺩﺏ ﻭﺍلﺘاﺭيخ ﻭﺍلﻔنﻮﻥ‬lrm; (2012), pp. 78-110
Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University
in Cairo and American University in Cairo Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41850739
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Coleridge's Kuhla Khatr. A New Historicist Study
Jalal Uddin Khan
Introduction: The New Historicist Approach
This article is an account of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla K

largely from the New Historicist perspective, which takes the histori
political situation of the writer as a starting point to analyze a literary
It draws upon a series of diverse references to demonstrate the histor
concerns of the poet, arguing that the poet's description of nature in
poem is deeply informed by the contemporary culture and discourse o
philosophical sublime, travel literature, earth sciences, and psychoanal
The essay also demonstrates that the poet's representation of the polit
figure of the title derives from, and is illuminated through, compari
with a number of historical personages whose conduct and actions equ
inform the poem as a whole. The reading I propose interprets the poe
a simultaneous confrontation and engagement with the concept of the
ural sublime, deep geological time of natural histoiy , Napoleon as a ch
of the French Revolution, his ambiguous excesses, and finall
Orientalist implications and intertextualities of the Kubla Khan refere
Since its publication in 1816 (it was composed early Novemb
1797), Kubla Khan has been discussed as a key Romantic poem ab
imagination and the organically unfolding process of imaginative
ativity, however linear or capricious, vague or distinct that pro
may be. Such examination of the poem has been done in line with
has been described as the traditional academic ideology of re
practices by which a text, especially a Romantic text, is explain
a reader-scholar in terms of its aesthetic and spiritual transcend
feelings rather than its social thought and historical reference.
academic discourse, critiqued to be insufficiently objective, simpl
the varieties of Romanticism(s), imposes a coherent leveling pat
on them, and calls for a text's synthesizing and homogenizing q
ties to be highlighted at the cost of its humanitarian contribution
its influence on culture and society.1 Rarely historicized by placi
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in its socio-historical and socio-cultural context, Kubla Khan has been
read as yet another work of imaginative introspection and solitary self-
communing, which New Historicism considers as anti-social and con-
servative. It is this spirit of reactionary introversion that the foremost
Romantic New Historicist critic Jerome McGann claims professional
academic critics identify with-to the extent of being "propagandist^"
proponents of the said Romantic ideology- disregarding the signifi-
cance of a text as a fundamentally socio-cultural product.
In Romantic Ideology, McGann "seeks to explain and restore
an historical methodology to literary studies" (ix).2 Critiquing the
"uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations" or
in the "self-definitions" of the "Romantic characterizations- both
artistic and critical"- McGann proposes "a new, critical view of the
subject that calls for a radically re visionary reading of Romanticism,"
as apears on the back cover of the book. He claims that:
The poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by

extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualiza-
tion whereby the actual human issues with which the poet-
ry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized local-
ities. A socio-historical method . . . helps to expose these
dramas of displacement and idealization without debunking
or deconstructing the actual works themselves. (1)
The "socio-historical" method McGann advances involves not only the

historical elements, direct or oblique, in a text, but also a rediscovery of
its engagement with those which may be "present" through their so-
called absence, evasion, or erasure. One of the latter is a text's engage-
ment with other texts, major or minor, neglected or underrepresented,
contemporary or of the past, and its demonstration that its status was/is
determined culturally by the influence of those texts upon it.
It is with such historical-mindedness that Kubla Khan will be
analyzed in this article. It will be approached with what David Ayers
calls "a mode of reading in which a theoretically informed historical
attentiveness is substituted for a traditional narrative historicism" and
what he defines as "a non-rigorous, speculative and comparatively

freewheeling approach to reading" (186). In agreement with Roy
Harvey Pearce, who says "Poems are not a means of transcending his-
tory ... but rather of meeting it" (559), this study will illustrate how
Coleridge's poem faces and stands up to history rather than escape
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from it. It will explore the poem's disguised involvement with its times
and open up several dimensions of contemporary history which need
to be taken into account in determining its meaning.
Much has been said, from the viewpoints of structuralism, for-
malism, New Critical close reading, and deconstruction, about the
poem's symbolism and the ironies, ambiguities, contradictions, and
instabilities in it, based on a rigorous, intellectually demanding, text-
only analysis (Cronin 265; Thomas 514). Also the subject of much crit-
ical examination was the circumstances of the poem's composition and
publication, the relationship between the preface and the poem, the
poem as a puzzling fragment or a unified whole, and as an equally puz-
zling dream vision in which the poet experiences a blend of poetry and
politics, the cultivated and the (supernatural, the feat of a completed
task that is Kubla Khan's pleasure dome, and the uncompleted process
by which the Romantic ideology of imagination sets itself in motion.
Critics have also focused on the series of oxymoronic, paradoxical, and
repetitive contrasts throughout the poem that have been noted by Jack
Stillinger: sacred and demonic; green and icy; tumult and quiet; light
and dark; Kubla as "the triumphant creator, or arrogant tyrant" (73); his
autocratic yet successful exercise of power by decrees in creating
something beautiful befitting his royal taste (perhaps in a parallel to the
way God dispenses his powers), on the one hand, and, on the other, the
nature of imperfection and incompleteness about the act of poetic cre-
ativity (paralleling human endeavor), and "wishfulness, as opposed to
accomplishment" (78). Stillinger rightly says:
There are, of course, numerous different ways to read

Kubla Khan, in part because Coleridge provided so many
contrasts of symbol and image. Kubla Khan's pleasure-
dome is set in opposition to the sacred river; the measured
and finite ("twice five miles," "girdled round") against
the "measureless"; the convex shape of the dome against
the concave imagery of caverns, chasm, and caves; sur-
face spaces against the subterranean; "sunny" against
"sunless"; "fertile" against "lifeless"; and so on. (77)
Such critical examinations ultimately served the purpose of the

Romantic idea of transcendence through imagination, spiritual quest,
and aesthetic beauty free of all kinds of moral and edifying content. As
noted at the outset, the poem's disarming magic inspired an ideologi-
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cally oriented over-identification by academic professionals who read
it as an attempt to symbolically describe the poet's internal journey to
revive lost worlds in the realm of imagination.
From a New Historicist perspective, however, no imaginative
flight or aesthetic experience can be pure and absolute in itself; nor can
it rise above the actual human situation on the ground (whatever the art
for art's sake concept may mean); and it always contains a class and cul-
ture bias (in this case, imperial). It is from the same point of view that
the poem's magical elements can be demystified and explained in terms
of its historical context- the French Revolution, Napoleonic invasions,
contemporary scientific/geological theories, (declining/rising) interest in
the orient, local Lake District landscape, and other political and poetical
works of the time by Coleridge and his circle- which has been exclud-
ed for too long by critics catapulted into what New Historicism consid-
ers insufficiently critical yet powerful academic practice. In tune with
the Foucauldian theory of "the circulating movements of power in many
spheres of society outside the strictly political" (Johnston 170),3 the pre-
vailing professional scholarship becomes absorbed into the poem's
Romantic/Coleridgean commitment to the principle of poetic imagina-
tion unfolding through its dream strategy. What follows is an attempt to
show how the poem achieves its transcending powers, not by evading its
specific historical context, but by actually locating itself in it and getting
completely incorporated to it. It is by being time- and place-specific that
the poem becomes entirely true to itself, thereby speaking to us, to use
McGann's term, through a "historical differential" ( Romantic Ideology
14), which actually makes it relevant to us. This study aims to expose
the poem's Romantic "incorporation" and challenge its "cooptation" by
"the coopti ve powers of a vigorous culture like our own," the terms
McGann applies to literary products in general ( Romantic Ideology 2).
Relating the poem to Coleridge's later works, including Allegoric
Vision, McGann argues that the organically unifying idea of poetic vision is
"reciprocally related to the poet's [allegorical] sense of the world as a field of
loss, division, and betrayal," of "illusions," "false-consciousness" and "divid-
ed or alienated consciousness" (Romantic Ideology 96). Despite the fact that
the poet's dream is as precarious as Kubla's stately pleasure dome- itself
symbolizing a human civilization, which, as a matter of historical irony and
inevitability, is subject to war and destruction prophesied by those "ancestral
voices"- and that the subject of the poem, like that of the Dejection Ode, is
"loss and the threat of loss of the poetic faculty itself," the shaping spirit of
imagination and the possibility of its renewal are presented as "the poem's
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ultímate defense" against any threat to "imagination's own self-renovating
powers" and its integrity {Romantic Ideology 98). McGann claims: "Raised
up against the barbarism of history along the stream of time, which threatens
to cany all things 'down to a sunless sea' . . . Coleridge's poem works at all
points to sustain its generative energy at the ideological level, and to drive out
the fears which beset the mind of his poem" ( Romantic Ideology 99-100).
According to McGann, Kubla Khan demonstrates a "conclusive emo-
tional affirmation of the ideology it sets out to reveal, interrogate, and finally
confirm" and transcends "historical divisions" by its connections with
Imagination ( Romantic Ideology 100). He continues to say that its "concrete
symbols deliberately forgo any immediate social or cultural points of refer-
ence in order to engage with its audience at a purely conceptual level," and
that its "immediate historical and social points of reference are all displaced
into symbolic forms" {Romantic Ideology 100-01). In contrast with Simon
Bainbridge, McGann agrees with Norman Rudich's political interpretation of
the poem, that it "has all the markings of Coleridge's reactionary politics,"
that it is "directed against the two Tartar despots, Kubla and Napoleon" and
that it is about the historical flux of "political revolutions betrayed by tyrants"
(qtd. in McGann, Romantic Ideology 102). Their agreement continues when
Rudich says that the poem is "Coleridge's flight from the political realities of
his day metamorphosed into an heroic assault on the bastions of human prej-
udice and delusion, with the inspired poet leading the vanguard of enlight-
ened spirits," and that "the poet alone can truly lead mankind out of the infer-
nal cycle and to the happiness of spiritual peace in harmonious reconciliation
with himself and God's nature" (qtd. in McGann , Romantic Ideology 102).
McGann expresses his continued agreement with Rudich by refer-
ring to what the latter calls the poem's "mythopoeic" and aesthetic trans-
formations, which "raise the poet's vision to sublime heights, heroic
grandeur," and by which the poem becomes "an exhortation to abandon
political struggle for the sake of the highest cultivation of the aesthetic,
moral, and religious qualities" (qtd. in McGann, Romantic Ideology 102).
McGann asserts that the poem in the end affirms "the basic articles of
Coleridge's aesthetic and cultural beliefs . . . [his] basic ideology of poet-
ry and the power of the creative imagination" {Romantic Ideology 102).
Therefore, although "the Khan is the conqueror and master of the world
... in Coleridge's view he is really no more than a passing historical rep-
resentative cast up from the central 'Romantic chasm' at the root of the
stream of time" {Romantic Ideology 102). McGann's observation that
there is in the poem a direct correlation between the ultimate master Idea,
which is God, and the Idea of "the manipulators of the creative imagina-
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tion in the mortai sphere" ( Romantic Ideology 102), which are the poets,
is an approving explication of Rudich's view that the poem "separates
poetry from history, sublimating its meaning into the theological realms
of absolute Truth and eternal categories of Good and Evil" (qtd. in
McGann, Romantic Ideology 102).
Both Rudich and McGann at best provide the broad outlines of a
historicist interpretation of the poem, but neither of them is exhaustive in
giving the details of socio-political and socio-cultural context which pro-
vide the rich and complex historicist dynamics of the poem. In explicating
such dynamics, let us start with the following (second) stanza of the poem
first, which is perhaps also the most problematic part of the poem:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er 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.4

(Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" 523)
The source and meaning of these lines could also be found outside the text
in terms of biographical or, more importantly, socio-politico-cultural rela-
tions that could plausibly be established as being among the circumstances
of the composition of the poem. As such, the above lines, along with the
river Alph running down to "a sunless sea," may have been inspired by the
beautiful hilly coastline of the Culbone and Lynton area, location of the
farmhouse to which Coleridge retired for a short time to recover from his
low spirits sometime in the summer or autumn of 1797 ("Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Exmoor." n. pag.). As Coleridge wrote to a friend, in spring,
the area turned to be in its full "pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak
of the august cliffs and the green ocean, and the vast Valley of Stones"
("The Wordsworths and Exmoor" n. pag.). The flowery nook described in
his poem Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement seems to be the
one near Lynton. Being home to his maternal ancestors, where he took fre-
quent walks, Coleridge knew the Porlock-Culbone area well, whose
autumn landscape made its way into Osorio (to be renamed Remorse later),
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which he was finishing during this time of retirement, in addition to com-
posing Kubla Khan ("Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Exmoor." n. pag.).
Contextualizing Kubla Khan
The Personal Context
In the preface to the poem, Coleridge claims that the farmhouse

was located "between Porlock and Lynton on the Exmoor confines of
Somerset and Devonshire" (Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" 523). As a keen
observer of nature, like Wordsworth, he was drawn to Exmoor, and
had daily walks on the Quantocks:
making innumerable studies in his notebook, like a painter

making sketches, to be introduced later into his poems. . . .
In October ... he followed a difficult zig-zag path from
Porlock to Culbone, climbing through woodland ... the
sound of the waves breaking below and distant views across
[the Irish Sea] to Wales filled him with pleasure and aston-
ishment. ("Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Exmoor." n. pag.)
One day early in November, he joined Wordsworth and Dorothy, then

living at Alfoxden house, just four miles away from the former's cot-
tage in Nether Stowey, to show them the way to Culbone and beyond.
Next day, they were off again, now to the Valley of Rocks, the setting
of Coleridge's prose narrative of murder and remorse, The
Wanderings of Cain, which remained unfinished because it never saw
Wordsworth's contribution to their intended joint collaboration.5
Within a week, they started again for Exmoor when Coleridge was
inspired to lay out the plan for and partly compose The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner , not only on the basis of some specific details pro-
vided both by Wordsworth (the idea of the crime of shooting a black
albatross plus a few lines) and Coleridge's friend and neighbor John
Cruickshank (who had shared with him his nightmarish dream about a
specter ship), but also some physical locations in Culbone itself.6
Kubla Khan is not only a Coleridgean reconciliation of opposites,
and so an exemplification of the Coleridgean concept of imagination as
defined in Biographia Literaria (Chapter XIV), but also an exercise in
the aesthetics of the sublime as understood by him as well as by Edmund
Burke, before him, in his A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). According to the lat-
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ter, the notion of the sublime includes the elements of pain, terror, and
self-preservation in the face of the larger aspects of nature and the tran-
scendental experiences of the human mind, as opposed to the beauty of
harmony, order, control, smoothness, and self-propagation in the sphere
of the finite. This is exactly what Coleridge also expresses in a letter to
John Thelwall in the autumn (14 October) of 1797:
... the universe itself, what but an immense heap of little

things? I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are
all little! 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, moun-
tains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity or
majestyl But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity !
(qtd. in Wu 460; my emphasis)
With "a sunless sea," "caverns measureless," "dancing rocks," "forests

ancient as the hills," a "mighty fountain" or a "sacred river" forcefully com-
ing out of the "deep romantic chasm," flinging up rebounding vaults of
"huge fragments" in the midst of its "swift half-intermitted burst" and
ceaselessly flowing in all its fury as if the earth were in a state of deep pant-
ing, thus making it "A savage place, as holy and enchanted," until it falls
into "a lifeless ocean," the landscape of Kubla Khan has all the character-
istics of the sublime. In poem after poem of about the same time,7 and
influenced by the (Erasmus) Darwinian idea of life in plants, Coleridge
advances the theme of the sublime through pantheistic "one life" tropes
about man and nature as well as a religious contemplation of the presence
of "the Almighty Spirit," "one omnipresent Mind," "supreme reality," and
"joy's deepest calm," perceived through a heightened state of spirituality.
In his Unitarian belief, human sublimity lies in the collective perception of
individuals on fraternal basis as part of the all-creating "one Mind": "Parts
and proportions of one wondrous whole;/. . . 'tis God/Diffused through all
that doth make all one whole" ( Religious Musings, 11. 142-44).
As mentioned above, both Coleridge and Wordsworth, in their univer-
sal pantheistic spirit during the early and most creative phase of their poetical
career (to be distinguished from their almost simultaneously developing
Christian ideals, which were to last throughout their later life), were influenced
by Erasmus Darwin's concept of external nature being imbued with conscious
and animated life, however limited that may be, with humans possessing such
life to the highest degree. The two poets were to explore this sublime idea of
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creative throbbing in all nature ("A motion and a spirit that impels
rolls through all tilings" to quote from Tintem Abbey [Words

brilliant conversation poems, just as Shelley was to do so i
Plant." What Darwin did in his panoramic The Botanic Gar
rendering in rhyming couplets the reproductive "love" or
plants- was done by Coleridge and Wordsworth in those p
much more poetically and transcendentally, including Coler
The Scientific Context
In fact, Kubla Khan's response to contemporary science is deep

and wide, and provides a fascinating key to its content. It is a common
knowledge that contemporary sciences, hailed by Coleridge in Religious
Musings as "heavenly Science" leading to "Freedom" from the narrow
confines of the established order, left their legacies on the imaginative lit-
erature of the time. During the Enlightenment through the Romantic peri-
od, both arts and sciences were thought to have common origins in human
imagination and human creativity, both wanting, as Tim Fulford says: "to
discover the vital powers that animated mind, matter, man, nature- every-
thing
that covered the workings of nature. They made common cause
methods were different, their goal the same" (90) .8 In p

into both the human and physical worlds at work, K
what Fulford calls the "dynamic interplay of creative po
the "one life" philosophy possible (Fulford 90).
Again, as Coleridge makes it clear in Religious M
thinking and collaborative knowledge of both science and
thought, in the 1790s, to be serving the cause of poli
from tyranny and injustice. Naturally, this view of
opposition from the conservative establishment, but
1830s, to the disappointment of Coleridge, it fell apart f
new men of science lost their interest in abstract philoso
matters. According to Fulford, Coleridge thought th
interested in "the quest to find the vital powers, settling
matic aims like inventing processes to aid industry"
putting aside their strong reservations about the indu
and technological advances such as machines, factorie
the practical effect or outcome of science, Romanti
with excitement to the pioneering scientific developmen
geographical exploration and the expanding empire. A
of their common interests was natural history/philosoph
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field of geology, which, along with other areas of natural science, trans-
formed the perception of the thinking minds, and made Coleridge's "one
life ideal" seem possible. The geological study of the earth brought to
attention the correlation between the history of life and the history of the
formation of the earth, thereby starting the debate about "biblical"
chronological time versus geological "deep" time, and creating the notion
of the depth and immensity of the universe (see Gould).
Coleridge was the most scientifically knowledgeable of all the
Romantics- Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Keats being the others with a
good knowledge of the same.9 It is, therefore, no wonder that Kubla
Khan projects a pronounced sense of the new sciences, especially the
evolutionary ones related to geology, astronomy, and chemistry.10
The "deep romantic chasm" passage in the poem, quoted above, per-
haps the most problematic part of the whole poem, is an illustration of
the geological sublime as suggested by geological theories concerning
the creation of the earth and its different layers of water, soil, rocks,
and fossils. Influenced by Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the
Earth (1681), which was mainly theological in its argument about the
origin of the earth, but which, nonetheless, came to be regarded as
"larger and more diverse than anyone had previously believed" during
the last quarter of the 18th century, Coleridge also concurred that the
natural world, as a fallen world, was marked by signs of God's pun-
ishment for the evils of mankind (qtd. in Roe 686).
As Marilyn Gaull describes Burnet: "Under the weight of sin, the
surface of the earth had collapsed releasing the inner waters in a great
flood that produced irregularities of landscape, caves, and shorelines,
and left the world 'lying in its own rubbish' as a monument to human
error and God's power" (687). James Hutton, who came to be regarded
as the founder of modern geology through his Theory of the Earth
(1785, 1788, and 1795), secular and scientific in approach, disagreed
with Burnet's description of the providentially-driven cause and state of
the changes in the earth. The Scottish geologist thought the universe was
neither originally created for human beings nor did it care for their inter-
est or existence. They were rather a later phenomenon, an accidental
addition in the "great recycling process" of nature (690). Humans were
left to themselves to find their own way on this indifferent earth, which,
in Hutton' s empirical view, "simply occurred" (690). Despite his signif-
icant differences with the younger and deeply Unitarian Coleridge,
Hutton was saying something that would have a striking resemblance to
Kubla Khan's elemental and ecological sublime: that "This was a world
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of process, transformation, conflict, destruction, generation, evolution,
with 'no sign of a beginning ... no prospect of an end'" (Gaull 686).
If Burnet is true in saying that "God had created the earth 6,000
years ago as a round, smooth, symmetrical sphere under a dome-like
heaven across which the stars were evenly distributed" (687), then the
opening part of Kubla Khan with the emperor's stately pleasure dome
and embellished gardens symbolizes the first stage of the earth and the
second ("deep romantic chasm") part symbolizes the post-Flood situ-
ation, with ancestral prediction of destruction already come true or
likely to come true again and again. In Hutton's view, the earth was
formed long before 6,000 years- that is, it was overwhelmingly old,
and its changes occurred through a gradual process rather than a sud-
den Deluge-like catastrophe.
Fulford points out the kinship between Hutton's and
Wordsworth's visions of man alone in a cyclical landscape in "A
slumber did my spirit seal." He continues to say:
Nature is not decorative in Wordsworth but a place that,

as in Hutton, opens under one's feet into visions of vast,
slow ineluctable power. So too in Shelley, who admired
both [Hutton and Wordsworth] and saw Mont Blanc [in
1816] more as a process than a place, since the mountain
is being built and destroyed by nature's huge forces as the
poet, fascinated, watches. (91)
The layers of sediment "produced pressure, and generated heat, earth-

quakes, subterranean fires, and volcanic eruptions from which the
whole cycle started again" (Gaull 689). Hutton's was "a vision of self-
sustaining earth that decayed and was renovated, renewed, shaped by
wind, water, heat, erosion, deposition, combustion, and uplift" (Gaull
689). His theory, which established the 'Vulcanist' interpretation of
the primacy of the volcanic activity in elevating new land masses as
opposed to the 'Neptunist,' "retreating-ocean model ... in order to
balance the forces of erosion," was attacked as "a godless denial of
Genesis and the Flood which fostered the atheism of the French
Revolution" (McCalman 551-52). As mentioned above, even though
Coleridge had fundamental differences with the Huttonian theory in
terms of either divine or secular causation of the earthly changes, he
seems to be presenting a complex poetical vision of the wrestling ideas
of both Burnet and Hutton in Kubla Khan.
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The poem's closeness or response to other contemporary liter-
ary-scientific developments continues. It describes the compound of
Kubla Khan's stately pleasure-dome as a garden:
So twice six miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were compassed round;
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
(Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" 523)
Such an image of the garden was popular at the time and is comparable to
the way the natural scientist and poet Erasmus Darwin used the same image
just a few years earlier as a microcosm of the organic natural world in his
Botanic Garden. Darwin's long poem of vast canvas helped to propagate
not only the work of James Hutton but also that of Hutton's acquaintance,
the originally-German astronomer Sir William Herschel, who likened the
ever expanding heavens to a "luxuriant garden" (qtd. in Roe 692).1 1
As a demonstration of continued kinship between poetry and science,
the chemist Sir Humphry Davy was writing poetry in the 1790s. Davy was
also helping Wordsworth edit the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800.
Davy's "rapturous lectures on chemistry and geology infused scientific dis-
course with the languages of sensibility and sublimity" (McCalman 479).
The close friendship between Davy and Coleridge, as pointed out by critics
(Fulford, Gaull, and McCalman), not only helped Coleridge to find some
measure of emotional steadiness but also launch his career as a public speak-
er, on the stage of the Royal Institution, on literary, cultural, and philosoph-
ical matters. Both of them believed that "the languages of chemistry and
poetry could mutually resist the advances of French scientific and political
rhetorics in the age of Napoleonic war," in Fulford's words. Fulford saw
Kubla Khan, therefore, as certainly a realization of the "lasting myth of
British Romantic science," which both Davy and Coleridge collaborated
together to foster. It belongs to the kind of "poetry realized in nature," the
voice of a vitalist "active universe" (qtd. in Roe 100).
The Political Context
Moving to the immediate origins of the poem in Purchas and the

Napoleonic historical figure - just as Wordsworth got the albatross idea
from Captain George Shelvocke's 1726 A Voyage Round the World By
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Way of The Great South Sea, in which Shelvocke described his rounding
Cape Horn in Chile, the southernmost point of South America (Wu
194)- Coleridge, by his own admission, got the idea of Kubla Khan from
yet another history/travel book, that is, Samuel Purchas's 1613 Purchas
his Pilgrimage, Or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in
All Ages and Places. Both Richard Hakluyt and Purchas started the tradi-
tion of travel literature. Purchas' last work Hakluytas Posthumous, or
Purchas his Pilgrims (1625), containing "A Histoiy of the World in Sea
Voyages and Land Travel," and dealing with voyages to India, Japan,
China, Africa, the West Indies, and many other places, is actually an
expansion of his 1613 work for which he used Hakluyt' s unpublished
papers and East India Company records (Thornley and Roberts 30). The
original passage in Purchas, Coleridge's primary source, goes like this:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan build a stately palace encom-

passing sixteen 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 mid-
dle thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be
removed from place to place. ... He has a herd of horses
and mares, about ten thousand, as white as snow; of the
milk whereof none may taste except he be of the blood of
Chengis Khan. According to the direction of his
astrologers or magicians, he on the eighth and twentieth of
August spends and pours forth with his own hands the milk
of these mares in the air and on the earth to give drink to
the spirits and idols which they worship (Purchas 415).
As we can see, the passage describes the superstitious practices of the

Tartar/Chinese astrologers or magicians, who arranged to have Kubla
Khan throw the milk of the beasts they held in reverence both in the
air and on the earth for the spirits and the idols they worshiped to
drink, in the hope that such deities would then preserve "the men,
women, beasts, birds, corn, and other things growing on the earth"
(Purchas 416). Purchas goes on describing, among other strange uses
of magic, the "marvelous" yet "devilish art" and the deceiving "holi-
ness" and "sanctity" of the necromancers, who could make it possible
for the rain to fall around the palace of Kubla Khan without touching
it and for him to drink from the bottles flying through the air. Clearly,
all this, conceived in oxymoronic terms, is exploited by Coleridge in
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the last part of the poem, which in its equally oxymoronic details-
such as the longing of the poet to build exactly the type of dome that
resembles Kubla's in the air, magic circles woven around him, who
has drunk "the milk of paradise" and the sense of the audience in "holy
dread"- is full of echoes from Purchas. The sunny dome with the
"caves of ice" that the poet aspires to build in the air is perhaps sym-
bolic of his autonomous or willed imaginative creations of great beau-
ty and "a circle round him thrice" perhaps symbolizes the willful or
self-imposed isolation of the romantic poetic genius. As Religious
Musings (1794-1796) and The Picture; or, The Lover's Resolution
(1802) from which Coleridge quotes in the preface to the published
version of Kubla Khan (1816) show, the symbol or image of the circle
is common in his poems, which use it for different purposes at differ-
ent times. If the magical thrice-drawn circle in Kubla Khan encloses
the poet from the outside world- to provide him with the necessary
isolation he needs to create- philosophers and bards, in Religious
Musings, spread the message of political freedom and liberty in "con-
centric circles" (1. 228). The direct correlation between poetry and pol-
itics in Religious Musings is reaffirmed in Kubla Khan with both the
emperor and the poet either celebrating or wishing to celebrate their
achievements by similar means, although there is the obvious differ-
ence of building the visual physical structure on the ground and the
visionary dome in the air.
Given the ample evidence available, it can be said that Kubla
Khan stands for Napoleon, whom, it is well-known, the Romantics
both loved and despised. At first, they admired Napoleon because
they found a heroic savior in him, and then they hated him because
he turned into an aggressor and a usurper, who interrupted the
progress of the Revolution and instated order at the expense of liber-
ty. According to some historical accounts, Kubla Khan also was
thought to have been autocratic in bringing all China under his con-
trol. But he was also thought to be a comparatively enlightened and
tolerant ruler, which is the position I take in this article and I think
Coleridge takes in the poem.
Despite the later unambiguous hostile attitude of the older gener-
ation of the Romantics towards Napoleon, their emotions of praise,
grief, disappointment, and disillusion with him during the second half of
the 1790s were far from easy and simple, and ultimately favorable. They
went through a full range of complex emotional reactions- glorifica-
tion, equivocation, castigation- to his rise and fall as they previously
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did over the fast-unfolding events of the French Revolution and its fail-
ure during first half of the decade.12 After all, both Coleridge and
Southey, who were at the time constantly corresponding with each other
over the actions of the charismatic and messianic Napoleon, described
him as having many identities: a military general, a man of science, man
"of various talent, of commanding genius, of splendid exploit" (qtd. in
Bainbridge, Napoleon 24), poet, philosopher, peacemaker, etc. It is sig-
nificant that one of Coleridge's three essays on Napoleon, published in
the Morning Post, March 11, 1800, suggests his deep ambivalence,
however, more in favor of, than against, Napoleon and concludes with
an image which recalls Kubla Khan's "miracle of rare device." The
essay reads: "In his usurpation, Bonaparte stabbed his honesty in the
vitals; it has perished ... but the mausoleum, where it lies interred, is
among the wonders of the world" (qtd. in Bainbridge, Napoleon 23).
Equally significant is that his notebook entry of May 1802
describes Napoleon as "Poet Bonaparte- Layer out of a World-garden"
(qtd. in Bainbridge , Napoleon 25). I agree with Bainbridge that this sug-
gests that Coleridge thought of Napoleon as a formidably sublime figure
who could arouse a sense of awe in him, and who could therefore unite
the dual roles of both the political Kubla Khan laying out his "gardens
bright" and the great poet building "that dome in air." Bainbridge, who
does not contest Richard Holmes's contention that the dating of Kubla
Khan could be as late as October 1799, points out that the final image of
milk and honey in Kubla Khan could be straight out of Southey' s letter
of May 13, 1799 to his wife Edith (Bainbridge, Napoleon 20). The let-
ter praised Napoleon's 1798-1799 expulsion of the despotic
Ottoman/Mameluk dynasty from Egypt, followed by his administrative,
scientific, and cultural reforms there, which, combined, presented them-
selves as a highly desirable alternative to the evil political system at
home under William Pitt, which made Southey remember the long
extinguished spark of Pantisocracy: "Well, well Buonaparte is making a
home for us in Syria, and we may perhaps enjoy freedom under the suns
of the East, in a land flowing with milk and honey" (qtd. in Bainbridge,
Napoleon 20). "Milk and honey" is, of course, a phrase from Exodus in
the Bible used to describe the heavenly food that the Israelites received
from God during their forty years long plight, also mentioned in the
Quran (2:57, 7:160, and 20:80). The expression was used by the first-
generation Romantics not only to praise Napoleon's political and mili-
tary measures in freeing the Egyptians from the Ottomans but also to
refer to the Quantocks, the hilly area of great natural beauty near Nether
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Stowey where Coleridge lived during his most creative period, which
included the writing of Kubla Khan (Holmes 166). 13
David Pirie also supports the idea that Coleridge had Napoleon and
his Egyptian campaign in mind when he composed Kubla Khan (248-49;
see also Maxwell). So does Jerome McGann, who finds a contrast in the
poem between the temporary ("precarious," to use his term) political
power represented by "the two Tartar despots, Kubla and Napoleon" (qtd.
in Bainbridge Napoleon 21) with the former being "the notorious Tartar
who brought the whole of China under his absolute control by military
force," on the one hand, and, on the other, the lasting quality of the poet's
creative power (25). Bainbridge takes issue with Norman Rudich's (and
implicitly McGann's) simplistic negative equation of Kubla Khan with
Napoleon, and thinks that, on the contrary, the equation is quite positive.
He argues that both Coleridge and Southey had at the time a far more seri-
ous, mainly favorable, though not totally unqualified, attitude towards
Napoleon, in stark opposition to the then British Prime Minister William
Pitt the Younger. The two poets generally continued to remain enthusias-
tic and excited about what Southey described as Napoleon's "greatness
and his glory" in the East even after their previous fears about his aggres-
sive policies (Bainbridge, Napoleon 22).14
Kubla Khan is not like Shelley's anti-Napoleonic Ozymandias
(1817), written two years after the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo.
Through the empty remains of the statue of the ancient Egyptian
pharaoh Ramses II, Shelley's sonnet makes an ironic and universal
statement about the autocratic dispensation of power by tyrants and the
vanity of their ambition. To borrow from Bainbridge, "[Napoleon's]
dominating influence can also be detected in several of the most
famous representations of political figures in the period, from
Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' with its juxtaposition of political and poet-
ic creators, to Shelley's portrait of the hubris of a fallen dictator in
'Ozymandias'" (Bainbridge, "The Historical Context" 20). The posi-
tive connection made by Coleridge between Napoleon and Kubla
Khan becomes further confirmed when we consider what William
Hazlitt, who was a lifelong liberal admirer of Napoleon (unlike the lib-
eral-turned-conservative Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and
Landor), has to say critiquing the Lake poets: "While they were build-
ing castles in the air, he gave law to Europe. He carved out with the
sword what they had only traced with the pen" (qtd. in Bainbridge,
Napoleon 3). This does not only recall the fundamental imagery of the
poem but also suggests- as pointed out by Bainbridge- the major
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Romantic theme of the relationship between the poetical and the polit-
ical. Bainbridge claims that this relationship has been well-explored in
Kubla Khan, a poem which attempts to synthesize the law-giving,
decree-issuing political authority of Kubla Khan with the poet's desire
to "build that dome in air." Again, that the poem in its synthesis may
have much to do with Napoleon's Egyptian expedition can be gauged
from Alan Bewell's description of the French move:
A distinctive feature of Napoleon's Expedition of 1798

was that it was not represented strictly as a military inva-
sion, but was more generally perceived as a major cultur-
al and scientific event: the beginning of the process
whereby modern thought would unlock the mysteries of
the Orient, (qtd. in Bainbridge, Napoleon 20).
History is the witness that it did in fact "unlock" those mysteries.

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt followed by British intervention there in
1799-1 804 not only opened a gate for Europe into the ancient Egyptian
customs and cultural heritage but also paved the way for the establish-
ment of an eastern Mediterranean empire.
The Orientalist Context

Without exception, Kubla Khan, since its publication, with its
references to China/Mongolia and Abyssinia (Ethiopia), has been
playing its part in unlocking the mystery of the Orient. Like many
other works by the Romantics, the poem is a creative exercise in
Romantic orientalism, but it is also a continuation of a long oriental
tradition in English literature. Ever since the phrase The British
Empire was invented in the late sixteenth century by the English math-
ematician and astrologer John Dee, who gathered descriptions of
newly discovered countries for Queen Elizabeth, the way was paved
for others to make use of Arab and Near Eastern elements as part of
the broader East extending from North Africa and the Mediterranean
through Turkey and Persia to India and China. Lady Macbeth knew
that all the perfumes of Arabia were not enough to mitigate her con-
science of guilt. The merchants under the East India Company pre-
sented Sir Francis Bacon with a cabinet of oriental jewels.
Seventeenth-century humanist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle,
who was a Director of the East India Company, got the New
Testament translated into Arabic in order to send it to Arab and
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Muslim countries (see Dick). It was during the same century that the
meaning of the holy Quran first saw its English and French transla-
tions, erroneous though they may have been in some ways.15
Following the lead of Richard Knolles's General History of the
Turks of 1603 (much admired by Dr. Johnson, Lord Byron, Southey and
Coleridge), there were Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimage of 1613 (immedi-
ate source of Kubla Khan ) and some minor Restoration works dealing
with the East by Dryden and Waller, among others. However, it was
actually the eighteenth century that marked the genuine literary interest
in the Orient, beginning with D'Herbelot's encyclopedic Bibliotheque
Orientale of 1697 (itself translated from Ottoman sources, and upon
which Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt drew heavily in their creative
encounter with the Muslim East) and Antoine Galland's highly influen-
tial Les mille et une nuits of 1704-1712, both of which were instrumen-
tal in creating a fascination for oriental tale. The other oriental English
landmarks of the eighteenth century include Dr. Johnson's philosophi-
cal fable, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia of 1759 (which had owed much
to the Portuguese Jesuit Father Jerome Lobo' s Voyage to Abyssinia
translated from French by Johnson himself in 1735, and which left a
mark on Wordsworth's "The Arab Dream" in The Prelude and
Coleridge's Kubla Khan), William Collins's Persian Eclogues of 1742

(reprinted as Oriental Eclogues in 1757), Edward Gibbon's The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1778), Beckford's Gothic Caliph
Vathek of 1786, and William Jones's scholarly works from Arabian,
Persian, and Indian sources during the 1770s-1790s. As J. J. Clarke dis
cusses the creative and intellectual contact between Asian and Western
thought in his Oriental Enlightenment, the body of the century's

English/French/German literature of Eastern origin (especially Chinese,
Indian, Persian, and Arabian) dealing with the influence of the political,
moral, and religious practices of those regions is considerable and con-
sists of philosophical treatises, poetical translations and imitations,
essays, letters, political speeches, epistolary novels and fictional, travel
and historical accounts with many English and Continental authors con-
tributing to the tradition (see Clarke).
It was this increasingly popular and widely practiced
"Enlightenment" orientalism that made Dr. Johnson open "The Vanity
of Human Wishes" (1749) with the famous couplet: "Let Observation,
with extensive view /Survey mankind, from China to Peru" (qtd. in
Leask 138). Both Johnson's title and verse would be echoed in Kubla
Khan, which with its own observation from China to Abyssinia and the
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suggestion of the destruction of great achievements can in fact be read
as Coleridge's version of the vanity of human wishes, romantically
framed as it is. Johnson's verse also anticipated the idea of what
Edmund Burke described in 1777 as "the Great Map of Mankind . . .
unrolled at once" with "no state or gradation of barbarism and no
mode of refinement" that was "not at the same instant under our view"
(qtd. in Leask 138). Burke was a great observer of the English affairs
both in America and India. His "great map" kept on unrolling as the
East India Company kept on extending its business empire with far-
reaching political impact. Then there was the issue of growing antag-
onism between France and India, to be settled through the mediation
of the Persian emperor. Although the British embassy headed by Lord
Macartney failed in its mission to win favorable trade deals from the
Chinese emperor Chien Lung in 1793-1794, the two other members of
the delegation, Sir George Staunton and John Barrow, produced trav-
el books about their visit to the geographically outlying locations such
as China. Such travel literature, Nigel Leask claims, may have worked
as a catalyst for Coleridge's poetic evocation of the Mongol/Tartar
emperor Kubla Khan, who was the ancestor of the Manchu dynasty of
that time, the last ruling dynasty of China, from 1644-1912 (140).
Clarke gives an account of the rise and decline of European
"Sinophiles," "Sinophilism," or the cult of China in the field of arts
and letters in the Age of Enlightenment through the early nineteenth
century, tracing the rise to early seventeenth century (37-53). 16 He
discusses how the worship of China and writings about Chinese antiq-
uities, culture, and religion were a significant part in the making of the
Orient by the West. "Sinomania" was being eclipsed not only by the
criticism of Chinese culture and civilization by many thinkers and
philosophers and the recantation by some of them of their earlier devo-
tion to China,17 but also by the revival of Hellenism during the 1750s,
rising enthusiasm for India, and the expulsion of the Christian mis-
sionaries from China in 1770. Kubla Khan marked an attempt at a cul-
tural re-engagement with "Chinoiserie" just as the Macartney
embassy's efforts did at a political and economic one earlier in the
same decade. Even in his formalist/new critical close reading, Richard
Cronin would acknowledge the historicist dimension of Kubla Khan's
China connection. He argues: "Kubla Khan decrees his dome to cele-
brate the peace that he has achieved by uniting all of China under his
rule, but the peace he has secured is the product of conquest, and
Coleridge's Khan dimly foresees that it will not survive him" (Cronin
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266). Coleridge's interest in Kubla came at a time when the cultural
allures of China were not holding any longer, metaphorically suggest-
ing the cycles of historical change- the same theme suggested in the
poem itself. As Sinomania gave way to a new love of the Orient in
India, Persia, Turkey, and Arabia, the fascination with the East would
continue with his contemporary Romantics (Southey, De Quincy,
Byron, Shelley, Moore, and Hunt), producing works of the color and
content of those countries. As the vast British Empire reached its peak
during the nineteenth century, it also started witnessing nationalistic
aspirations of its colonies, and thereby showing signs of unraveling
disintegrative tensions and anxieties over its controversial, at times
oppressive, hold over the East, regardless of whatever integrative and
assimilative measures it attempted to take, until it had to relent at last,
again repeating the cycles of history alluded to in Kubla Khan and also
both by Rudich and McGann.1 8
The Euro-American Connections
Kubla' s stately palace by "the sacred river" Alph in Xanadu is an

ideal establishment representing a towering achievement in human his-
tory. Reading about it and being forewarned about its possible destruc-
tion in the future ("from far/Ancestral voices prophesying war"
[Coleridge 523]) reminds us about the rise and fall of the Homeric Troy
and Arthur's Camelot in ancient Britain, mentioned by Cronin, though
in a different context. It also reminds us about the noble Danish king
Hrothgar and his great hall Heorot subject nightly to the ravages of the
monster Grendel in Beowulf. More interestingly, it is emblematic of the
recent failed French Revolution, probably one of the symbolic mean-
ings of William Blake's "The Sick Rose." The doom that Kubla's
pleasure-dome may soon face reminds us of Coleridge's own plan for
his failed Pantisocracy in 1794- a plan partly prompted by the disillu-
sionment of the French Revolution as well as the contemporary evil
political system in his own country. Under the Utopian scheme, he,
together with Robert Southey, was supposed to establish an ideal egal-
itarian community on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United
States, but by the following year, Southey started having doubts about
the practicability of their trans-Atlantic project, and instead proposed to
change the site to Wales. The two men could not agree on the location,
and the project did not materialize. However, influenced by the Utopi-
an writings of the past (of Plato, Thomas More, and Francis Bacon, for
instance), Coleridge and Southey, in their conception of Pantisocracy,
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were influenced by the rosy travel accounts of the new continent on the
Americas, free from the corruptions of the Old World (Europe), of J. P.
Brissot, Thomas Cooper, and Joseph Priestley.
Conclusion: Kubla Khan as the Eastern Other
The evanescent qualities of Kubla' s palace also prove to be

prophetically true about the rise and fall of civilizations in general
throughout history. In addition to Volney's The Ruins: A Meditation
on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), Coleridge knew and comment-
ed (in Table Talk ) on Edward Gibbon's highly influential The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). In particular, as by his
own admission he was reading at the time of composing Kubla Khan
about the history and culture of the Chinese and Central Asian regions
in the fourth of the nine books of Pur chas his Pilgrimage (1613/1614),
Coleridge may have had in mind what could be seen as the Eastern
"other" for the Western empires- rise and fall of the huge empire
under the Mongol Khans (Chinggis Khan and his grandson Kubla
Khan, to name the two most famous), more than twice the size of
Alexander's or Julius Caesar's.
The historiography covered by Samuel Purchas in 1613 was

vast. While the title page of the fourth book alone says, "Of the
Armenians, Medes, Persians, Parthians, Scythians, Tartarians,
Chinois, and of Their Religions," the main title of the whole work is
really daunting and formidable. It reads:
Purchas his Pilgrimage Or Relations of the World and the

Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered,
from the Creation up to this Present. In Four Parts. This
First Contains a Theological and Geographical History of
Asia, Africa and America. Declaring the Ancient Religions
before the Flood, the Heathnish, Jewish, and Saracenical in
all Ages since . . . with brief Descriptions of the Countries,
Nations, States, Discoveries, Private and Public Customs.
Such a historiography, at least in the context of the fourth book,

included the Chinese Sung and Ming dynasties (who saw their for-
tunes turned during the century-long Mongol rule), the fourteenth cen-
tury Timurid empire under the Central Asian conqueror Tamburlaine,
and the rising Mughal empire in India about the same time, all of
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which had their stories of death and destruction, occupation and
defeat, side by side with the economic and cultural ties they estab-
lished all across the East, from India to Persia to the Islamic heartlands
in the Middle East and North Africa, both by land and sea.
While the Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258, their fleet
against Japan was destroyed in 1274, and Tamburlaine caused vio-
lence and bloodshed in many places as far as Delhi and Damascus,
and Turkey and Egypt. The Mongols, especially under Kubla Khan,
and the Chinese after him, had relied heavily on Muslim officials and
established a network of diplomatic, cultural, and business connec-
tions with Muslims, fostering tolerance and understanding between
the two regions, historically symbolized by the famous Silk Road.
The thirteenth-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo (d. 1324), who
served Kubla Khan for seventeen years before returning to Italy, and
the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta made their trav-
els to India and China known to the world centuries before Samuel
Purchas. During his final voyage back home, Marco Polo was accom-
panying, on behalf of Kubla Khan, a bride for the Mongol Ilkhanate
Sultan Argun, then ruling the Islamic heartlands. Journeying in the
opposite direction, Ibn Battuta was accompanied by Abyssinian war-
riors to repel attacks by Hindu pirates as he was taking the royal gift
of horses and other valuables from Sultan Mohammad Shah II of
Delhi to the Chinese emperor around 1341 . The epochal circumnavi-
gating voyages of the past- including the ones by Ferdinand
Magellan (in early sixteenth century) and Francis Drake in the 1570s
rounding the southernmost tip of South America, Cape Horn, located
in the Chilean waters, about which Wordsworth read in a book and
shared with Coleridge- left a mark at the planning stage of The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner. Likewise, both recent and distant travel nar-
ratives also left their impact on Kubla Khan .19
Apart from France, Spain figured prominently in the writings of
the first-generation Romantics- Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge,
Landor, even the younger Byron and Leigh Hunt. Many of their
works- such as Sophia Lee's Almeyda, Queen of Granada (1796), a
tragedy set in Moorish Spain, Coleridge's fellow pantisocrat Southey' s
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal ( 1 797) ,
which was a result of his visit to those countries immediately following
the failure of their jointly planned Pantisocracy, and Landor' s oriental
Gebir (1798), which was an attack on the Spanish prince Gebir's inva-
sion and colonization of Egypt- came about the same time as Kubla
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Khan was being written. At the time Coleridge was composing the
poem, he was also finishing his tragedy Osorio (later to be revised as
Remorse), set in Granada at the time of the Spanish Inquisition institut-
ed in 1478 onwards. Together with the contemporaneous and jointly
authored (with Southey) The Fall of Robespierre, Osorio is an expres-
sion of Coleridge's radical views about Catholic Spain's oppression
and injustice against the Jews and Muslim Moors of the time. It follows
that the historic rise and fall of civilizations that Kubla Khan is argued
as alluding to includes the Muslim/Moorish (southern) Spain, called
Andalusia, of about eight hundred years, from 711 to 1492, when
Islamic Granada was regained by the Catholics in what came to be
known as Reconquista. It was during the Nasirid dynasty in the last
centuries of Muslim rule in Spain that many aesthetic and engineering
wonders of dazzling palaces, pools, and courtyard gardens were built,
fed by a network of underground fountains, canals, and the nearby
mountain rivers.
For a long time, European Christians believed in the legend of

an Earthly Paradise as well as the realm of a Christian monarch
named Prester (or Presbyter) John, both of which were thought to be
somewhere in the East, possibly Ethiopia, also known as Abyssinia
(from Abassens/Habassens/Habasha, meaning those inhabiting the
extended part of the southern Arabian into the African/Ethiopian
desert). The heavenly realm was believed to have been the land of
four major rivers flowing out of it- the Nile, the Senegal, the Niger,
and the Congo- whose origins explorers, especially from Portugal,
sought to find. The Nile was traditionally identified with the great
river that was rumored to have existed in sub-Saharan Africa.
Naturally, one of the easiest ways to reach the earthly paradise was to
follow the Nile to its source. Although Ethiopia was finally reached
after a series of Portuguese missions during the fifteenth century, it
did not turn out to be the land of earthly paradise or the ideal Christian
kingdom as dreamt about. However, these geographical misconcep-
tions led to expeditions that finally made possible the discovery of not
only the sources of those great rivers but also the sea route to India
around Africa by the end of the century.
A large part of Purchas his Pilgrimage, Book Seven, has been
devoted to the legendary Prester John (or Priest John), described as "the
Alpha of learned men in our age" (671), and his Ethiopian empire with
constant references to Abyssinian associations, the "great" Queen of
Sheba (Coleridge's Abyssinian maid?), and the "holy" Nile, which may
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be taken as the original of the "sacred" river Alph in Kubla Khan. With
its descriptions of antiquities and rarities, this part of Pur chas strikingly
asserts its presence in the landscape of Kubla Khan. They include the
stately (pagan, later Christian) temples, "the most magnificent in all
Ethiopia," standing at the foot of the divinely blessed hill Amara, "the
place of our forefathers' paradise," and built in honor of the frequenting
deities as well as the sun and the moon, the surrounding "sweet, flour-
ishing and fruitful gardens," and the "pleasant spring" passing down the
hill through a "great" plain, making a lake, and giving rise to a river near
the Nile, which falls into "the father and great king of waters, the sea"
(Purchas 677). The reference to Mount Amara, of which the Abyssinian
maid, Coleridge's muse, is singing, again, unmistakably alludes to
Ethiopian/Abyssinian paradise in Purchas, where there is a detailed
description of the hill revealingly anticipating/echoing what is there in
the poem. The hill is a steep one, "dilating itself in a round form . . . with
impassable tops thereof, many fruitful and pleasant vallies wherein the
kindred of [Prester John] are surely kept ... a mountain glittering in some
places like the sun, saying all that was gold" (672). In Purchas, there is
yet another similar passage, just five pages later, which is also highly sug-
gestive of the landscape of Kubla Khan (Wu 462, n. 8).20
There is a striking resemblance between these descriptions in
Purchas of the Abyssinian paradise of the Amara valley and that of the
palace of the Amhara valley in Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia , so much so that it seems not only Lobo' s book on Abyssinia
but also Purchas' s account of the same was an important source for the
setting of Johnson's philosophical tale, both in turn having influenced
Kubla Khan. Like Purchas, Johnson also describes Abyssinia, at the
very outset, as the land of a "mighty emperor," where the Nile, "the
Father of Waters, begins his course, and whose bounty pours down the
streams of plenty, and scatters over half the world the harvests of Egypt"
(Johnson 2680). Johnson goes on describing the happy valley and the
palace therein, the details of which suggest ringing parallels between
him and Purchas, and anticipate Coleridge's poem.
Coleridge was fascinated by James Bruce's popular Travels to
Discover the Source of the Nile (1790). The narrative of the travels is high-
ly romantic, and mostly takes place in Ethiopia/Abyssinia. Coleridge
quotes Bruce in his Religious Musings ,21 and once even thought of writing
about "seeking the fountains of the Nile" ("Kubla Khan Sources- Bruce" n.
pag.). In 1807, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont: "Coleridge
says that the last edition of Bruce's Travels is a book that you ought by all
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means to have" ("Kubla Khan Sources- Bruce" n. pag.). Citing the cata-
logue of details in Bruce such as thick woods and cedar groves, which
seemed a cover from which savage animals might jump out at any moment,
hills with cliffs and caves, and downhill slopes, John Livingston Lowes
argues, in his famous The Road to Xanadu, that Coleridge adopted many
striking images from Bruce and that his Xanadu resembles the area around
the fountain from which the Nile begins, the Nile itself being the equiva-
lent of the Alph ("Kubla Khan Sources- Bruce" n. pag.).
In its description of the royal palace enclosed by gardens, Kubla
Khan shows an influence, through William Jones (1746-1794), of the
scriptural, especially Quranic descriptions of both earthly and heaven-
ly paradises. Jones, the foremost eighteenth-century British Orientalist
who "discovered" the treasures of ancient classical Arabic, Persian,
and Sanskrit, and recommended that European literature be given new
life by borrowing from fresh Eastern imagery, had a pioneering influ-
ence on the English Romantics in paving the way for inculcating a new
taste for natural beauty and spontaneity suffused with oriental color
and flavor (see Jalal Uddin Khan's "The Beautiful" and "Influence").
He says in his essay on the "Poetry of the Eastern Nations" (1772):
Mahommed, in his Alcoran, in the Chapter of the

Morning [Al-Fajr] , mentions a garden called Irem [or
Iram], which is no less celebrated by the Asiatic poets
than that of the Hesperides by the Greeks. It was planted,
as the commentators say, by a king named Shaddad and
was once seen by an Arabian, who wandered far into the
desert in search of a lost camel. (Chalmers 435).
As the king of a great non-Semitic people who settled in southern Arabia,

Shaddad built the earthly paradise called in the Quran Irama Dhati'l-
'Imad, which means "Many-columned Iram" or, in the translation of the
meaning of the Quran by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, "the (city of) Iram, with
lofty pillars/The like of which were not produced in (all) the land"
(1732). It is important to note that the context in which God mentions
this- to illustrate how He destroyed the ancient 'Ad and Thamud people
and their cities due to their transgressions- resonates well with the
prophetic warning of war and destruction in Kubla Khan. They were the
great-grandchildren of the prophet Noah, and, in consequence of their
violations against the warnings of the prophet Hud, were smitten into the
desert sands. Iram, as a romanticized lost/ruined city or palace, came to
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be known to the Western world through the Arabian Nights, and just in a
couple of years of the composition of Kuhla Khan , Southey would refer
to Iram as a safe haven for his Muslim hero Thalaba in his epic Thalaba
the Destroyer ( 1801), set in the Middle East, providing evidence that both
works may have shared some common sources indeed.22
The landscape of Kubla Khan resembles not just Shaddad's para-
dise as described by Jones and Scott but also the fertile gardens surround-
ing the legendary Ma'rib dam and the magnificent throne of the Queen of
Sheba, who- together with her son- founded the Abyssinian dynasty and
ruled over the same happy and blessed southern Arabia (modern Yemen
and Ethiopia/Abyssinia combined), described in the Biblical as well as
Quranic texts in connection with her contemporary the wise Solomon and
his temple, again in the context of the retributive justice of God that fol-
lowed the violations of her people in the ancient kingdom of Sheba/Saba'.
All these ancient religio-historical details, together with those related to
the descendants of Cush and Sham including the Ethiopians or
Abyssinians in the empire of Pres(by)ter John, are described, even before
the Seventh Book mentioned above, at the beginning of the Third Book of
Purchas Pilgrimage, called "Of The Arabians, Saracens, Turkes, and Of
the Ancient Inhabitants of Asia Minor and of Their Religions" (227-29,
659, 683). Purchas mentions a number of Arabian cities such as Mecca,
Medina, and Aden but describes "Theima or Theman" as "a city walled
fifteen miles square, enclosing ground for tillage in the walls" (Purchas
229), which anticipates Kubla Khan's enclosed palace ground.
It is possible that Coleridge's poem, with its references to great
structures, sacred rivers, fruitful gardens, and the milk and honey of para-
dise may also have something to do, by way of Johnson and Jones, with the
oft-repeated descriptions of paradise throughout the Quran, which says, for
example: "But it is for those who fear their Lord. Those lofty mansions, one
above another, have been built: beneath them flow rivers (of delight)"
(39:20, Ali 1242; my emphasis), "Verily God will admit those who believe
and do righteous deeds, to Gardens beneath which rivers floW (47: 12, Ali
1380; my emphasis), and "(Here is) a Parable of the Garden which the
righteous are promised: in it are rivers of water incorruptible; rivers of milk
of which the taste never changes; rivers of wine, a joy to those who drink;
and rivers of honey pure and clear. In it there are for them all kinds of fruits',
and Grace from their Lord" (47:15, Ali 1381-82; my emphasis).
As if Johnson's poet-philosopher Imlac were William Jones's
model predecessor or mouth-piece, he says: "I was desirous to add my
name to this illustrious fraternity. I read all the poets of Persia and Arabia,
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and was able to repeat by memory the volumes that are suspended in the
mosque of Mecca" (Johnson 2693), referring to the Quran and other sacred
texts hung on the wall of the holy mosque called the Kaaba. Jones, with his
knowledge of classical Arabic (and Persian and Sanskrit too), translated the
pre-Islamic competition prize poems (Odes) known as Mu'allaqat, sus-
pended from the walls of the Kaaba. The grandness of God's House on the
earth, as Muslims believe the Kaaba to be, lies in its cubical simplicity, with
its immediate vicinity in the surrounding valley famous for the living mem-
ories of Abraham, Ishmael, Hajar, and especially the holy miraculous
spring, Zam-Zam, ceaselessly gushing forth, for thousands of years now,
out of the still unknown underground source. These aspects of the holy
sanctuary have their resounding echoes in Kubla Khan.
Kubla Khan can be, and has indeed been, read in many different
ways. Critics have reacted to its structural and symbolic multiplicities
and intertextualities; on my part, I have attempted a post-structuralist
and new historicist study of the poem, relating it to a wide breadth of
cultural and culturally heterogeneous representation rather than typical
Romantic spiritual introversion and introspection, expanding the disci-
plinary boundaries into the interdisciplinary. By definition, any histori-
cist study has a progressive import, a forward-looking thrust with an
objective and dispassionate liking for the social and humanitarian, not
necessarily what is radical and revolutionary. As observed by Johnston,
historicism may not be very interested in distinguishing a good poem
from a bad one, but it "values poems for their historical influence or
socio-political impact" (171). And that is what Kubla Khan does, for it
speaks to that effect and leaves behind a trail of historicist thought.
Historicism is a move far beyond, in the words of Aidan Day, "the
self-referential, self-mystifying, self-transcendentalizing Romantic ideolo-
gy," which, by contrast, contains implications of reactionary politics, politi-
cal conservatism, and the tendency of anti-social and anti-humanitarian
thought (161). He, therefore, argues, in line with the New Historicist direc-
tion towards a representation of a range of cultural forms which include both
the literary and non-literary, that "the politically radical aspects of literature
of the period would more usefully be described as 'late Enlightenment,'
while the term Romantic may be taken to define, among other things, an
essentially conservative tendency of thought" (Day 5). Putting aside the
Romantic ideology-related emotional identification with and absorption into
the state of self-communing, and read, instead, with historicist thought and
mind, Kubla Khan is seen to be navigating through a host of political and
cultural reflections, creating a ramification of its meaning and achieving an
104 Alif 32 (2012)

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augmented status of social significance. The series of overt allusions it
makes to diverse materials surely invites a historicizing analysis of it. The
way the poem blends poetry and politics, dream and reality, the imaginary
and the documentary, and process and product, and correlates poetical long-
ing with political fulfillment, religious impulse with magical enchantment,
contemporary sciences with historical travel literature about the Orient, and
finally the local landscape with the exotic settings turns it into a fertile
ground for a historically attentive cultural studies critic.
Notes
1 Kenneth Johnston points out that this ideology was most prominently
established, among others, by M. H. Abrams in his The Mirror and the
Lamp, published in 1953, and Natural S upematuralism : Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature, published in 1971 (Johnston 170).
2 Also relevant in this connection is his A Critique of Modem Textual
Criticism , published about the same time as the initial part of his project
to articulate the theory and method of historical criticism.
3 Johnston explains that while Marxism has a linear tendency with class and
money at the base, with everything else being superstructure, Foucault's
theory is more diffuse, extending to "the power of professions or disci-
plines, the complex powers of gender, the power of language" (170).
4 In terms of psychoanalytical reading, which is well within the purview of
historicism, this part of the poem personifies the constant underground geo-
logical activity with an analogy connotative of the mother's womb, cli-
maxing sexual intercourse, reproduction, and childbirth. Karen Mahar
argues that Coleridge metaphorically describes the process of creative imag-
ination by that of male/female psycho-sexual orgasm and female anatomy.
Mahar views the quoted verses as symbolizing the geologic activity by the
climax in sexual pleasure, vagina, pubic hair, visual and audible aspects of
a woman experiencing orgasm, and male ejaculation (n. pag.).
5 It seems likely that Coleridge's retirement to the farmhouse took place at
the time of this walking tour to the Valley of the Rocks with the
Words worths. Then, the probable date of the composition of Kubla Khan
is early November 1797 (Wu 461, note 1).
" " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was to take Coleridge five months to
complete. . . . The harbor from which the mariner set out was undoubt-
edly Watchet, where they stayed, and the hermit's woodland home was at
Culbone" ("Samuel Taylor Coleridge andExmoor." n. pag.).
7 See, for example, Effusion XXXV (later 'The Eolian Harp"), This Lime-
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Tree Bower My Prison , Religious Musings , and Reflections on Having
Left a Place of Retirement.
8 For example, apart from Erasmus Darwin versifying science, consider
William Blake engraving the scientific papers of the Royal Society;
Wordsworth defining poetry as "the history or science of feelings" (in the
headnote to The Thorn ) and describing the subject of The Excursion as
"Man, Nature, and Human Life." Coleriche championed the writer-
chemist-natural philosopher Joseph Priestley as he did the chemist-writer
Humphry Davy; he and Southey hailed Edward Jenner who invented vac-
cination for pox as a national hero. The writer-scientist Benjamin Franklin
is another example (see Fulford and Gaull).
9 For their scientific involvement, see Levere, Grabo, and Kipperman.
Byron's Cain and Heaven and Earth are a humanist response to the geo-
logical and astronomical theories of his time. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein is a critique of the inhuman loneliness and the isolation of
researching scientists as well as the egotism of literary geniuses.
10 For a study of the relationship between the conception of nature and sci-
ence in the Romantic period, see Lussier, Eiseley, and Wilson.
11 It is worth mentioning here that John Keats drew inspiration for his
"new planet" simile in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,"
composed in 1816, from Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus in
1781, just as he was inspired by Herman Cortes's geographical explo-
ration of 1519 in his "Cortez" simile (Gaull 691).
*2 The following brief chronology is provided for the convenience of the gen-
eral readers: the French Revolution (storming of Bastille), 14 July 1789;
Birth of the French Republic, 22 September 1792; Execution of Louis
XVI in February 1793; England declared war and joined the alliance of
Austria and Prussia against the revolutionary France in 1793;
Robespierre's Reign of Terror, October 1793-July 1794; Napoleon's
Italian campaign of 1796-1797; his invasion of Switzerland, January
1798; his Egyptian expedition, 1798-1799; his retreat from Acre (Egypt)
after the French army had been desolated by plague in the spring of 1799;
his coup ďetat of November 1799.
13 Also see Southey 's letter of October 18 to Humphry Davy about
Napoleon's campaign in Italy and Egypt (Bainbric^e, Napoleon 32).
14 It is not only Bainbrid^e but also Dominic Pino who is highly critical of
Rudich's (mis)reading of the poem in "Coleridge's Kubla Khan ," saying
he (Rudüch) is "wrong on many accounts." Convincingly demonstrating
that the word "daemonic" is used in Kubla Khan to mean "a benevolent,
transcendent power that is associated with nature" just as "savage" is used
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"to represent a primordial state, a place unaffected by the corruption of
man," Pino too claims that Rudich takes those words in today's sense of
something brutal and evil (which is wrong in the context of the poem),
and that Rudich's analysis highlighting the negative similarities between
Kubla Khan and Napoleon is simply "incorrect" (n. pag.).
1 5 The first English translation was by William Bedwell in early seventeenth
century followed by that of A. Ross in the 1650s, which was done from
the French translation by Du Ryer in 1647. George Sale's 1734 English
translation was from Maracci's Latin translation of 1689.
1 6 In discussing the China cult in Enlightenment Europe, Clarke refers to

the enthusiasms for China of these authors: (English) Sir William
Temple, John Webb, Sir William Chambers, the deists (David Hume and
Matthew Tindal), Alexander Cozens and his son John, and Oliver
Goldsmith (1762); (French) Montaigne (late sixteenth century), La
Mothe le Voyer (1642), Isaac Vossius (1660), Malebranche (late seven-
teenth century), Pierre Bayle (late seventeenth century), the works of the
French Jesuits, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1735), Marquis d'Argens (1739),
Voltaire (1755), Diderot, Helvetius, and Francois Quesnay (1767);
(German) Leibniz (late seventeenth and early eighteenth century) and
Christian Wolff (eighteenth century).
17 According to Clarke, Diderot and Helvetius backed down from their earlier praise
of China. Montesquieu, Friedrich Grimm, and, more importantly, Rousseau
and Condorcet were highly critical of Chinese culture and society (37-53).
18 For an understanding of British imperialism and Romantic orientalism, see
Saree Makdisi's Romantic Imperialism (1998); Tim Fulford and Peter
Kitson's Romanticism and Colonialism (1998); J. J. Clarke's Oriental
Enlightenment (1997); Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh's
Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture (1996); Nigel Leask's British
Romantic Writers and the East (1992); Javed Majeed's Ungovemed
Imaginings (1992); John Barrell's The Infection of Thomas De Quincey
(1991); C. A. Bayly's Imperial Meridian (1989); Edward Said's Orientalism
(1985); Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance (1984); and P. J.
Marshall andGlyndwr Williams's The Great Map of Mankind (1982).
19 Such voyages and narratives also include those by Sir John Mandeville
in the mid fourteenth century, Vasco da Gama, who completed his voy-
age around the Cape of Good Hope to India in 1499; Christopher
Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci (in late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries), Ahmad Ibn Majid in late fifteenth century, Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe (1719), Richard Pococke' s A Description of the East
and Some Other Countries (1743), James Cook andBligh in the 1780s.
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Admiral Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim, who descended from a Mongol
warrior, made seven voyages across the south and south-east Asia and the
Middle East, beginning 1405.
20 For revisions from original "Amora" to "Amara" to "Abora," sœWu 462, n. 8.
21 In a footnote to line 269, Coleridge quotes a passage from Bruce's Travels
describing the suffocating heat and haze which accompany the tropical
desert storm called simoom (Noyes 384).
22 Influenced by Jones, his contemporary John Scott (1730-1783) describes
Shaddad's paradise garden Irem in the poem "Zerad; or, the Absent Lover:
An Arabian Eclogue," the whole poem being prompted by the description
of the sublime Arabian desert life in Jones's essay. "The Atlantis of the
Sands," as T. E. Lawrence would call Iram, continued to appear in many
works of literature.
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Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": A New Historicist Study / ‫ ﺩﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﻣن‬:‫ﻗﺼيدﺓ " ﻗﺒﻼﻱ خاﻥ " لﻜﻮلﺮيدﺝ‬

‫ﻣنﻈﻮﺭ ﺍلﺘﺄﺭيخانيﺔ ﺍلجديدﺓ‬

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41850739

Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo and

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Jalal Uddin Khan

Introduction: The New Historicist Approach

This article is an account of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla K

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The poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by

The "socio-historical" method McGann advances involves not only the

what he defines as "a non-rigorous, speculative and comparatively

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There are, of course, numerous different ways to read

Such critical examinations ultimately served the purpose of the

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But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.4

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Contextualizing Kubla Khan

The Personal Context

In the preface to the poem, Coleridge claims that the farmhouse

making innumerable studies in his notebook, like a painter

One day early in November, he joined Wordsworth and Dorothy, then

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... the universe itself, what but an immense heap of little

With "a sunless sea," "caverns measureless," "dancing rocks," "forests

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rolls through all tilings" to quote from Tintem Abbey [Words

The Scientific Context

In fact, Kubla Khan's response to contemporary science is deep

that covered the workings of nature. They made common cause

methods were different, their goal the same" (90) .8 In p

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Nature is not decorative in Wordsworth but a place that,

The layers of sediment "produced pressure, and generated heat, earth-

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So twice six miles of fertile ground

The Political Context

Moving to the immediate origins of the poem in Purchas and the

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan build a stately palace encom-

As we can see, the passage describes the superstitious practices of the

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A distinctive feature of Napoleon's Expedition of 1798

History is the witness that it did in fact "unlock" those mysteries.

The Orientalist Context

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Coleridge's Kubla Khan), William Collins's Persian Eclogues of 1742

thought in his Oriental Enlightenment, the body of the century's

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The Euro-American Connections

Kubla' s stately palace by "the sacred river" Alph in Xanadu is an

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Conclusion: Kubla Khan as the Eastern Other