SOURCE: "The False Poets in 'Kubla Khan,'" in English Language Notes, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, December, 1988, pp. 48-55.

In the essay below, Hewitt identifies two distinctive themes present in "Kubla Khan " which reveal that the "poem as a whole displays a dilemma: it shows that the two extant theories accounting for poetic composition fail to provide a sufficient explanation of that phenomenon."

Readers choosing to understand "Kubla Khan" as a comment on poetry may deem most concomitant interpretive issues settled some time ago by George Watson [in "The meaning of 'Kubla Khan'," in A Review in English Literature, 1961]:

"Kubla Khan," then, is not just about poetry: it is about two kinds of poem. We have one of them in the first thirty-six lines of the poem; and though we do not have the other, we are told what it would do to the reader and what it would...