ABSTRACT
The comparison with 'Christabel' is the more tempting since both poems are largely composed in four-footers; but it is impossible to explain, though easy to applaud, the strange compromise whereby 'Kubla Khan' moves in the most traditional of iambics from paragraph to paragraph in a rhyme-scheme that is always present, and yet neither stanzaic nor yet like an ode. 'Kubla Khan, is a more difficult case to interpret than the preceding poems, but then by the late 1790's Edith Coleridge might be said to have earned some right to be difficult. If 'Kubla Khan' is a poem of the annus mirabilis of 1797-8, as still seems likely, and late rather than early in that year, then it is a striking inversion of Coleridgean formula. Certainly 'Kubla Khan' is a difficult poem, in the sense that it calls for careful exegis based on a good deal of information about Coleridge's intellectual preoccupations.
