Fancy, Dreams, and Paradise: Miltonic and Baconian Garden Imagery in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

This article challenges conventional readings of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan that interpret the poem as presenting an ideal model of poetic creativity. In locating the intertextual web of references that point to Milton’s Paradise Lost and various texts by Francis Bacon, the garden imagery of the poem, which has been so resistant to critical interpretation, can be read in the context of a rejection of Coleridge’s own empirically grounded theory of inspiration expressed in his 1796 volume of poems. A Coleridgean theory of dreams is presented as a framework by which the prose Preface to Kubla Khan can be shown to reveal the poet’s criticism of the dream-language by which the poem was purportedly constructed. The Preface affixed to the 1816 version of Kubla Khan will be subject to critical reassessment, in order to understand the circumstances surrounding its publication history. The major contention of this article is that Kubla Khan is a revision and rejection of Fancy, the poetic form of inspiration, material in its operations, and conceived as the agency by which Coleridge’s early poetry was produced.