Person from Porlock
I have read so much British poetry this semester. I have never been a fan of poetry but I kind of love Coleridge for his apologetic ways. “Kubla Khan” is an amazing journey into bizarre-ville.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man.
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem’s subtitle A Vision in a Dream) but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock. A note on a manuscript by Coleridge explicitly states that he had taken opium at the time to combat dysentery.
The person from Porlock thing has me fascinated.
It has been suggested that… the Person from Porlock was in fact fictional and intended as a credible explanation of the poem’s seemingly fragmentary state as published. The poet Roger McGough also suggested this view in one of his own poems, saying “I think he got stuck.”
“Few people,” Pinsky said, “can write without procrastination, time-wasting, whining, and avoiding.” But writers hate admitting that, and may create spectacular fibs to cover it. “The most famous example is Coleridge,” with the person from Porlock, which Stevie Smith saw through. Pinsky says writers of today have “the perfect Porlockian escape: the telephone,” provided there’s no answering machine.
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