The story goes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in 1797, immediately upon waking from a strange dream fueled by opium. Coleridge had been reading from a massive travelogue written by the seventeenth-century traveler Samuel Purchas. Feeling indisposed, he took a dose of laudanum and fell asleep while reading Purchas’s account of Kubla Khan, the thirteenth-century Mongol leader and founder of the Yuan dynasty of China. The account described the Khan’s palace and sumptuous surroundings in his summer capital in Shangdu, which is spelled “Xanadu” in the poem. Coleridge’s dream transformed this ordinary vision into an otherworldly landscape centered on a mysterious “pleasure-dome” that floats miraculously in air. Also key to this landscape is the fictional River Alph, which flows between a hillside chasm and the ice-clad cavern that houses the dome of pleasure. Occult forces seem to infuse every part of this landscape, creating supernatural spaces where the holy and the demonic share an ambiguous coexistence. The overall effect of Coleridge’s poem is hallucinatory and somewhat jarring, as befits a work whose full title reads, “Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” Yet the poem also offers a meditation on the power—as well as the limits—of the poetic imagination.

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