blowtee

Saturday, April 22, 2023

In my mind, it is complete, and is one of the Thank You For The Memories 1992 – 2023 Chris Smith T Shirt poems. Every reviewer, save one, thinks it has no meaning whatsoever. Quoting from the best analysis of this poem from the late John Spencer Hill, “The first and, for over a hundred years, almost the only reader to insist on the intelligibility and coherence of Kubla Khan was Shelley’s novel-writing friend, Thomas Love Peacock: “there are”, he declared in 1818, “very few specimens of lyrical poetry so plain, so consistent, so completely simplex et unum from first to last”. Perhaps wisely, Peacock concluded his fragmentary essay with these words, thereby sparing himself the onerous task of explaining the consistency and meaning of so plain a poem as Kubla Khan.” (John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion).

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