Failure Of Kubla Khan: In & Beyond The Poem

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution (since 1760's) and French Revolution (1789-1799), romanticism appeared in England.Byron, Shelley and Keats represented the active romanticists.Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were the passive or escapist romanticists. Frightened by the coming of industrialism, these writers were turning to nature for protection and they paid great attention to the spiritual life of man.The three passive romanticists have also been known as the "Lake Poets", being active chiefly round the Lake District in northwest England. Under the pen of the Lake Poets, symbolic pictures often take on a mystic color. Coleridge is the best representative of this style, and that is where his poetic fame largely conies from.Talking about Coleridge, no one knows him without noting his KublaKhan.Have you ever read Kubla Khan, probably the most contentious and, at the same time, the most fascinating poem in literature?Have you got confused by the so many unrelated yet unique agents or images that appear in the poem? Have you ever asked the same question as many people would, after being shocked by theeccentricity, beauty, wonder and mystery of it------what does thepoem intends to tell, especially when you find that the illogical and incomplete poem bears a complete and logical addenda?If you have, then my thesis is for your attention.In fact, it is Kubla Khan that demonstrates the Coleridgean style: mysterious, eccentric, enthralling and unique. Moreover, this poem has attracted diverse interpretations, some of which are extremely conflicting.This thesis, with its seven parts, is yet another try besides the many interpretations to Kubla Khan.Pan I deals with the life review of Coleridge: his nightmares in childhood, his talents and his laudanum addiction, his initial enthusiasm for revolution, his failure in family life, his famous cooperation yet unhappy ending with Wordsworth.... More important, this section suggests two points: Coleridge's best poems were all written within the years when he was in close contact with Wordsworth, and Coleridge's excuse for his inability in finishing Kubla Khan was probably not true.Part II through most of its paragraphs repeatedly shows the poetic charisma of Kubla Khan, aimed at making one point clear: Kubla Khan is worthy of being studied meticulously.Part III carefully selects four critical problems that lead to the necessity of analyzing the addenda together with Kubla Khan itself: since the addenda were not composed at the same time with the poem, what is the poem intended to tell its readers? This question bears more significance when it turns out that the many interpretations of Kubla Khan fail to explore the rhetorical relationship of the addenda with the poem itself, and the ways in which such relationship reveals Coleridge's inner self.Part IV satisfies three goals: it lists seven images in the addenda and the poem to be discussed in Part V and VI, just to avoid being misunderstood; it puts forward a common view that Coleridge was trying to apologize for his poem through his preface; it emphasizes a parallel structure between Kubla Khan and its preface.Part V is the first half of the analysis, showing that the addenda provide a context through which to interpret Kubla Khan as a representation of imaginative failure and disillusionment.As the second half of the analysis, Part VI reveals Kubla Khan's ultimate intention with emphasis on the structure of the poem paralleling that of the preface. As a result, this part demonstrates the failure of Kubla Khan in two aspects: on the one hand, Kubla Khan did not meet Coleridge's ideal of poetic creation but rather, it was a product of a passive poetic process. Coleridge failed to complete the narration of his dream. On the other hand, literary reviews of Kubla Khan demonstrate that Coleridge failed in the eyes of his contemporaries, and Coleridge's desire to be a poet of pure imagination secures his eternal isolatio...