The problem with which this study is concerned is analysis of the criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." This poem, one of the poet's most widely anthologized poems, has been the subject of forty-five articles. The poem has also been treated extensively in a number of books. The criticism is divided into three categories: psychological, literary, and archetypal.

This paper evaluates the critical response to Samuel Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." In the Introduction I outline my critical approach, which attempts to see the relationships between parts of the poem, sources outside the poem and poet himself. In analyzing Coleridge's esthetics, I have come to the conclusion that the poem was the first of a new type of Romantic poem. The central structural principle of this type of poem is the use of illusion and the fragmented form, or the illusion of the fragmented form. Poems that fall within this esthetic frequently use the "vision within a dream" motif as a metaphor for this illusion.