1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Union of Opposites

2. Imagination Understanding Art – Artifact – Artificial Unreal Illogical
Lacks reason
Understanding
Nature
Real
Logical
Reasonable

3. Images in “Kubla Khan” Imagination Understanding
“caverns measureless to man”
“sunless sea”
“lifeless ocean”
“honey dew”
“milk of Paradise”
Understanding
Man’s quantitative abilities, his empirical readings, are insufficient to understand the world

4. Juxtaposed Images in Poem
Wildness
Heights
Explosive creative force
Warmth
Holiness
Tumult
Artifice
Momentary present
Light
Peaceful scene
Gentleness
Depths
Calm obliteration
Coldness
Demonism
Lifelessness
Nature
Ancestral past
Dark
Prophecies of war

5. “Kubla Khan: or, a Vision in a Dream”
The poem came to Coleridge “as in a vision” after he took a prescribed anodyne and fell into a deep sleep. What we have is only a fragment of what he dreamed.
Figures such as the “pleasure dome” and the “sacred river” take on an allegorical cast and suggest the power that inspires the writing of poetry.

6. The Air of Magic and Mystery
The poem promotes the Romantic ideal of poetry as spontaneous, impulsive and free of narrowly rational thought.
WARNING!
The poem is highly crafted. Just look at the use of assonance, consonance, alliteration, and internal and end rhymes of just the first five lines

7. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless see.