SOURCE: “The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan On Coleridge's Introductory Note” in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam's Dream, edited by J. Robert Barth and John L. Mahoney, University of Missouri Press, 1990, pp. 97-108.

In the following essay, Perkins discusses the importance of the introductory note to “Kubla Khan,” noting that it guides the reader's interpretation of the work from start to finish.

Coleridge's introductory note to Kubla Khan weaves together two myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and then dispelled irrecoverably. The nonexistent lines haunt the imagination more than any actual poem could. John Livingston Lowes used to tell his classes, W. Jackson Bate remembers, “If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on business from...