SOURCE: Patterson, Charles I., Jr. “The Daemonic in ‘Kubla Khan’: Toward Interpretation.” PMLA 89, no. 5 (October 1974): 1033-42.

In the following essay, Patterson concentrates on the “daemonic” element in “Kubla Khan,” linking the work with a Platonic view of the inspired or “possessed” poet, which the critic contends is central to an interpretation of the poem.

As is well known, there are strong differences of opinion concerning both what Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” expresses as a whole and the symbolic import of major elements within the poem. Perhaps no other poem of the time, not even Keats's Lamia, has evoked more widely diverging views of its meaning. Coleridge designated it a fragment in his prefatory statement, but critics differ just as frequently on whether or not it is a fragment as they do concerning its interpretation. Psychological analyses of it have often ranged far afield from what the text will adequately...