Samuel Taylor Coleridge details the celebration of personal expression and individuality through the fragmentary, quixotic trance of Kubla Khan as well as the …show more content…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan explores the manic, opium-fuelled “Vision in a dream” of the idyllic realm of Xanadu, articulating his belief that universal perfectionism remains the definitive link between the self, nature and the Higher Power. Coleridge’s declaration of the “stately pleasure dome, where Alf the sacred river ran”, builds on the fertility and richness of the human mind ignited by the first breath of life from the ultimate power. Akin to the “caverns measureless to man” the limit to man’s richness and creative genius becomes restricted by his inability to understand it, becoming more than merely an intense decree of individuality but a means of dichotomising the true nature of man, liberating his beauty and brutality “a savage place! As holy and enchanted as e’er beneath a waning moon” and the unstable nature of the self that Coleridge longs to