Layers of Fiction in Kubla Khan

After reading this poem, I was dying to know more about its strange preface. Is it a preface? I don't even know what one would call the entirely bizarre beginning part of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". The fact that it is in the third person is already very different from the other works we've read by him in class. So far as I know of him, he feels very comfortable talking in the first person and describing luscious accounts of nature, but I suppose he also is comfortable breaking the rules a bit. For example, his and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads was groundbreaking in its simplicity in comparison with all the sublime language being used in poetry at the time. The fact that Coleridge addresses himself as a celebrity, though, is very shocking and unlike anything I would expect a poet to say from this time period (or any time period, really). Perhaps it is also necessary to remember that he is about to take a opium-induced nap, but anyways...I guess the analysis I read of the preface that I found the most believable to me was that this poem is narrated by a fictional person, and I think it was inspired by a dream he had (maybe he dreamed all of this entire preface and poem up! but maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself).

I tend to think this because after reading about "Purchas's Pilgrimage" and its absolutely immense volume, I doubt that it would be a book that Coleridge would happen to be carrying around with him. Like I stated previously, I also find it strange that he would be writing in the third person, and perhaps switching to that register is a way of letting us know that he is not the narrator of the poem. I also read an interesting interpretation of this poem that claims that the interruption of the person from Portslock could have been written as a means of shortening it and therefore being able to properly call it a "fragment". There is often (if not always) more than meets the eye or ear as far as Romantic poets are concerned, which makes it the most fun to pick apart and put back together like a gorgeous puzzle. Even if I'm adding my own layer of fiction here, and if our own analyses don't reflect the author's intentions, isn't the actual leaving of the art to the people of the earth the real intention of the artist anyways? Maybe not the case for all artists, but definitely for those of the Romantic Age.

I would also like to point everyone in the direction of this wonderful article concerning Coleridge and science by Radiolab's Jonah Lehrer: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/07/coleridge_and_science.php Go read it! It rocks