Coleridge and the dream

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) studied at Cambridge. Together with Wordsworth, he was one of the earliest Romantic poets.

They divided their work in an interesting way: Coleridge made the supernatural seem real, while Wordsworth made the ordinary seem strange and remarkable.

Byron, Shelley and Keats were the next generation of Romantic poets.

The story of 'Kubla Khan' is famous. Coleridge was ill, and had taken a medicine that made him sleepy. He fell asleep while reading about Kubla Khan, the Mongol emperor who founded a dynasty in China, and had a vivid dream in which a whole poem came to him.

When he woke, he began to write it down. But a visitor called on business and interrupted him. When he returned, the rest of the vision had faded, so the poem remained a fragment.