SOURCE: Watson, George G. “‘Kubla Khan.’” In Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems, A Casebook, edited by Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman, pp. 221-34. London: Macmillan, 1973.

In the following essay, originally published in 1966, Watson sees “Kubla Khan” as “a poem about poetry” and a premonition of Coleridge's subsequent critical statements concerning the transformative qualities of the imagination and his definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Before he was twenty-six years old, and before the first edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared, Coleridge had made himself a poet of many languages: an apprentice in many styles, and already a master of some, as ‘The Ancient Mariner', ‘Christabel', and ‘Frost at Midnight’ all variously show. He was perhaps the first European poet to set himself the task of achieving a wide diversity of styles based upon models other than classical ones; the undertaking, after all...