The Opium-Induced Composition of Kubla Khan
Poet involved
What happened
While staying at a lonely farmhouse on the Somerset-Devon border, Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell asleep in his chair after taking an anodyne of opium to soothe an indisposition. During a profound three-hour sleep, he composed an intricate, hundreds-of-lines poem where vivid images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of corresponding expressions. Upon waking, he eagerly began transcribing the dream-verses until he was abruptly interrupted by a nameless 'person on business from Porlock', causing the remaining vision to evaporate.
Literary impact
Published as 'Kubla Khan', this fragment became the definitive manifesto of English Romanticism's reliance on spontaneous subconscious creation. It shifted the poetic ideal from conscious craft to unedited dream-revelation, directly laying the aesthetic groundwork for the automatic writing techniques used by twentieth-century Surrealists.
Source: Wikipedia
