ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues the distinctive patterns implicate in Coleridge’s physical, intellectual, and imaginative relation to the wild—a self-directed exposure to “the influxes / Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements” that he wrote of in “The Nightingale”—and the poetic principle, fundamental to every branch of his work, that emerges in the pursuit. In its mythopoetic amplitude, “Kubla Khan” presents a microcosm through which to enter the macrocosm of the Coleridgean wild. Most audaciously, the poem invokes the nexus of the “holy” and “enchanted” in a daemonic hierophany that binds a communion with the wild to the act of poetic utterance. Taking this daring analogue as a psychotropic guide to the ways in which (throughout his career) Coleridge’s work acknowledges and adapts to the wild as a living mystery within human experience, this chapter shows how his thinking and writing strive to act in concert with its presence and its power. In doing so, it explores the permanently irruptive life that Coleridge sought to weave into the fabric of his metaphysics: the “perpetual Genesis” (in his phrase) whose end, like poetry, is in its means. The result is a fresh reading of the relation between nature and culture, and the articulation of a dynamic continuity between the natural, the imaginal, and the artful.
