SOURCE: “Kubla Can: Wordplay in Coleridge's Poetry,” Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 8-12.

In the following essay, Kennard focuses on Coleridge's use of puns in “Kubla Khan.”

Summarizing Coleridge's attitude towards the pun, Sylvan Barnet notes three separate strains: “As a man in social situations he enjoyed puns and punning; as a philosopher he detested distortions of language; as a student of Shakespeare he found explanations for some puns and ignored others” (“Coleridge on Puns,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 56 [1957] 602-609). Published more than thirty years ago, Barnet's article and subsequent scholarship only tells part of the story. As the work of James McKusick in Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (1986), and of Timothy Fulford's Coleridge's Figurative Language (1991) has shown, Coleridge's attention to the pun is in fact central to his lifelong interest in language, an interest that cannot be totally separated from his wider religious and...