Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Coleridge published Kubla Khan in 1816 with a prose preface telling readers exactly how the poem came to be broken off. He had fallen into a deep sleep on medicine he had taken, he wrote, after reading a sentence about the palace of Kublai Khan in an old travel book, and had composed some two to three hundred lines whole in that sleep, with no sense of effort, before waking and beginning to write them down. A person from Porlock, a nearby town, called on business, detained him above an hour, and when he returned to the page the rest of the vision had gone, leaving only the fragment now printed. Later scholarship has treated this account with real suspicion rather than taking it as reportage. The travel book Coleridge names is real and the passage checks out, but the specific claim of composition entire in sleep, with the interruption as the sole reason for the poem's incompleteness, fits a pattern in Coleridge's own writing about his own work: an excuse offered in advance for a piece he had in fact set aside, worked at intermittently, or simply could not finish to his own satisfaction. Richard Holmes, whose biography treats the preface as part of the poem rather than a transparent window onto its composition, reads it as Coleridge shaping his own legend as much as recording an event. What is not in doubt is the effect: the person from Porlock has passed into the language as a name for any unwelcome interruption that costs a work its ending, regardless of whether the original interruption happened quite as told.