690 Coleridge and the Person from Porlock [Ad-Free]

episode

The History of Literature not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from The History of Literature

821 A History of the Kiss (with Katie Barclay) | Wonderland Books! (with Amy Joyce and Gayle Weiswasser) 1h 25m · 03 Aug 2026

817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard 1h 33m · 16 Jul 2026

All episodes from The History of Literature →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded27 Mar 2025

Publisherrss.introcast.io

Handlerec:9053883

Show notes

[This episode originally ran on July 18, 2016. It is presented here without commercial interruption.] In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and fell into a stupor. When he awoke, he had in his head the remnants of a marvelous dream, a vivid train of images of the Chinese emperor Kubla Khan and his summer palace, Xanadu. The vision transformed itself into lines of poetry, but as he started writing, he was interrupted by a Person from Porlock, who arrived at Coleridge’s cottage on business and stayed for an hour. when Coleridge returned to his work, the vision had been lost, and the fragmentary nature of the poem Kubla Khan has haunted its admirers ever since. The resentment has centered around the bumbling Person from Porlock, whose visit remains shrouded in mystery. The scholar Jonathan Livingston Lowes put it bluntly: “If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered,” he wrote, “it is the man on business from Porlock.” Who was this Person from Porlock, and why was he knocking on the door of Coleridge’s cottage? How did Coleridge handle the interruption, and what did it mean for him and his art? And finally, what might we take from this vivid legend today? Music Credits: “Handel – Entrance to the Queen of Sheba” by Advent Chamber Orchestra (From the Free Music Archive / CC by SA). “Piano Between” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.