SOURCE: "The Meaning of 'Kubla Khan'," in A Review of English Literature, Vol. 2, 1961, pp. 21-9.

Australian-born Watson is a distinguished critic, editor, and lecturer of English at Cambridge University. He is the author of numerous studies of English Medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian literature and political history. In the following essay, Watson disputes interpretations of "Kubla Khan" as a "dream poem"; it is instead, he asserts, a lucid critique of the poetic imagination.

We now know almost everything about Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' except what the poem is about. E. H. Coleridge, years ago, shrewdly corrected Coleridge's misdating of his own poem to May 1798 [Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1912], and Mr. Morchard Bishop has plausibly identified the very farmhouse in Culborne, a tiny village on the Somerset coast, where the poet may have been interrupted in his composition by 'a person on business from Porlock' ["The Farmhouse of...