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In this seminal romantic poem Coleridge uses the aesthetic autonomy of the romantic imagination as a regulative principle, which however requires a historical and natural context in order to function. As in Hegel’s progressive teleology, Coleridge constructs autonomy through receptivity between the intelligible and the sensible, and due to these binary constraints there is an underlying vacillating tension between a presence and absence of full disclosure of aesthetic aesthesis in the poem. To begin with, there is an inherent self-consciousness at work in the poem

itself. Coleridge added his famous framing device describing the conditions of the poem’s composition—the stranger having arrived on business from Porlock after he had taken two grains of opium, which denotes the self-consciousness of the work.

Here, Coleridge is using a framing device that doubles as a kind of parabasis for the poem, something often used in self-conscious and ironic works. Mellor argues that the self-conscious romantic artist hovers between artistic creation and destruction in their work, and one can fruitfully apply this conception to “Kubla Khan”. Mellor goes on to outline Schlegel’s concept of Selbstbeschränkung thus:

In Schlegel’s terms, the ironic artist must constantly balance or

“hover” between self-creation (Selbstschöpfung) and self-destruction (Selbstvernichtung) in a mental state that he calls Selbstbeschränkung, a rich term variously translated as self-determination, self-restraint, or self-restriction. Self-determination thus involves the artist in a process in which he simultaneously projects his ego or selfhood as a divine creator and also mocks, criticizes, or rejects his created fictions as limited and false.³⁷

In one sense therefore the artist’s work deconstructs itself as it unfolds and this limit, or transcendental play of freedom and constraint, actually informs the overall trope of “Kubla Khan”.

Mellor’s reading of the poem, however, suffers from its reliance on romantic irony as a principle in romantic criticism. This orients the reader into a more closed reading of the text, without allowing for engagement in a philosophical, and more open reading of the work. For example, after giving a fruitful analysis of the poem, (using romantic irony), Mellor confines the final analysis within the bounds of irony as a presumptive principle at work in the poem as a whole:

By calling the poem “a fragment,” Coleridge guiltily protects himself against the charge of blasphemy, of committing himself personally to the creation of such a miraculous dome in the air. Hostile readers are hereby invited to assume that in the additional lines Coleridge himself would have rejected this vision as irrational or even immoral and affirmed instead their communally shared values of logic and morality.³⁸

Whilst acknowledging that the fragmentary nature of the poem hints at Coleridge’s sense of ‘limit’ with regard to his poetic powers, or with regards to the sustainability of the romantic imagination, at the level of aesthetic aesthesis, this does not imply that Coleridge “guiltily protects himself against the charge of blasphemy.”

Coleridge, through the vehicle of the fragmentary allegory is celebrating the fragmentary nature of the romantic imagination in that he at least has partial access to an unsustainable aesthesis, whose visions may return. The secondary imagination is something that is an epiphenomenon of the primary imagination, and therefore can only reflect (as the dome upon the waves) the dynamic energy of the primary, and as such is only fragmentary and refractory in nature. Coleridge, rather than protecting himself is actually exposing himself as the exponent of the secondary romantic imagination; however this disclosure of the secondary romantic imagination is self-consciously only fragmentary and fleeting.

Within the poem the stately pleasure dome is a conscious structure, self-imposed by the Khan-poet against the forces of history and the natural world, with its own laws and architecture. However, the poem is a self-conscious work, and as such the poet situates the dome within a pastoral landscape, or hortus conclusus, in which the poet senses a type of receptivity to the forces of nature, history and tradition; a tradition within which the imagination cannot help but to suffuse its own creative powers. Paradoxically, the original symbolic nature of the hortus conclusus in the genre of the Dream Vision was a depiction of a garden surrounded by a wall, which symbolised the virginal nature of Mary. For the Khan-poet therefore the pastoral enclosure implies a sense of limit to the fecundity of his imaginative powers. The dome can also be read, in a philosophical sense, as the ultimate symbol, a self-referential creation by the Khan-poet; however, the inescapability of the

pastoral leads to the allegorical embodiment of the romantic imagination within a temporal framing device, whereby the symbol is actuated only in relation to another, anterior sign: that of the pastoral.

The allegorical Khan poet cannot stand outside the temporality of time and history, and due to this limitation the poet cannot stand in a position of transcendent percipience. Just as the pleasure dome is set within the bounded grounds of the pastoral natura naturans, so the aesthesis is not a ‘pure’ intuition, but only a reaction to external forces, and set within the bounds of the pastoral landscape.

Importantly, in the traditional Dream Vision something within the dream usually awakens the dreamer and after the dream there are a few likely interpretations available that will encourage debate about cultural issues of the day. This reading gives the reader a much stronger indication of Coleridge’s direction in “Kubla Khan.” Coleridge himself awakens from the dream, and this is important because of the self-conscious structure of the poem; Coleridge is in effect interrogating himself and therefore is awoken by something exterior to the dream—the subject cannot normally awaken himself from the dream.

The debate for Coleridge is centred on the possibility of intuitive truths, which can be realised in and through the romantic, organic, imagination. It gives a hollow victory to the literary critic to constrain the poem’s meaning within the confines of a single romantic-ironic reading, rather than reading the poem as the opening up of meanings and possibilities, which are actuated by the romantic-ironic and fragmentary structure of the poem. Coleridge attempts to plunge the reader into a state of philosophic uncertainty within the allegoric structure of the poem itself, which functions in the final instance as a self-referential instance of the philosophic Sehnsucht inherent in the poet’s overall corpus. For Coleridge, the relationship

between tradition and the individual talent is allegorised in the generative tension between the “decreed” stately pleasure dome and the ubiquitous pastoral landscape.