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Overview
“Kubla Khan” is a poem written by the British Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1797
. The poem recounts a fragmentary dream in which the speaker has a strange vision of Xanadu, the summer capital of the thirteenth-century Mongol leader named in the title. At the center of this vision is a mysterious “pleasure-dome” that floats miraculously above the water in a cave of ice where a sacred river feeds into “a lifeless ocean.” Although it concerns a real person and a real place, the poem arguably has little to do with its exotic subject matter. Rather, it is a poem that explores the bizarre logic of dreams as well as the possibilities and limits of poetry.Read the free full text, a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of famous quotes from “Kubla Khan.”
