Thus, the poem was the fruit of an opium trance. The medicine Coleridge took was laudanum, a combination of opium and alcohol, and his addiction to it would intermittently but severely ruin his health and his ability to work over the next two decades. The reason it is a fragment, he says, is that the whole poem, which came to him in a dream after taking medicine for a slight indisposition, was some 300 lines long, and he began writing it down when he was interrupted by the famous and unnamed “person on business from Porlock.” An hour later, he had forgotten almost the entirety of the rest of the poem. There he explains that he is publishing it at the behest of a great and celebrated poet-Lord Byron, who had used his great fame to intervene with his own publishers on Coleridge’s behalf-despite the fact that it is only a fragment. The long note by Coleridge explaining the circumstances of its composition ought to be considered a part of the poem too. Originally written in either 1797 or 1798, it was not published until 1816 (along with Christabel). By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on FebruĪlong with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Kubla Khanis one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two most famous and most-quoted-from poems.
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