payment page
The speaker of “Kubla Khan” doesn’t reveal much of anything about themself. We don’t know even know their gender identity, much less their class position, racial identity, or professional affiliation. All we really know is that the speaker is having a bizarre dream vision of people and places that, though historically real, are nonetheless filtered through the lens of their imagination. The simple fact that these people and places figure in their dream indicate that the speaker has dedicated time and thought to them in their waking life. For this reason, we may suppose that the speaker is someone who likes to read about and imagine far-off places that they’ve likely never seen for themself. Considering the number of references to the occult, it’s also reasonable to assume that the speaker has a taste for esoterica. These diverse interests and readings have, by way of the logic of dreams, made their way into the speaker’s sleeping consciousness, which has remixed them in strange and even terrifying ways.
For many readers and critics, the above description helps make a compelling case for thinking of the speaker as Coleridge himself. Coleridge was very interested in far-flung and exotic lands, and he read voluminously on the subject. This interest led him to write poems like “Ozymandias,” which took as its focal point a collapsing statue in the Egyptian desert. Coleridge also had a longstanding interest in the occult, which he frequently integrated into his idiosyncratic poetry. See, for example, the bizarre and often hallucinatory vision he brought forward in his allegorical poem of 1798, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in 1797, around the same time as the “Rime.” But whereas the latter poem was a narrative work with a clearly fictional speaker, the speaker of “Kubla Khan” could very well be a poet. Furthermore, it is well known that Coleridge first drafted the poem immediately upon waking from an opium-induced dream. These biographical details do indeed make it plausible to consider Coleridge himself as the speaker of the poem. However, it isn’t necessary to make this connection to engage meaningfully with the work.
