What were the other two places besides Xanadu and Alachua, that Coleridge based Kubla Khan on, Greg?
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The four sites include Shangdu, “which lay in what is now the Zhenglan Banner of the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, in northeast China: capital city of Kubla Khan. Also the holy caves of ice in Kashmir, near Pahalgam, at the northern end of the Lidder valley. Mount Abora of course, associated with the Abyssinian maid, located in east central Africa. The holy site in question is Gishen Mariam, in the Abgasel range, forty miles north of Dessie (Ethiopia). And then Alachua County, Florida. I discuss this siting of Xanadu in Internet Invention (p. 96 ff). Two sources are important: Caroline Alexander, The Way to Xanadu: Journeys to a Legendary Realm (1993)–my source for the details above. Also the classic John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1955). Lowes describes Coleridge’s poetic imagination as working with “hooks and eyes” to make connections among dispersed bits of memory, discourse, history. These are the hooks and eyes of felt. Lowes traces various lines of Coleridge’s poem back to the sources in his readings, including Bartram’s Travels, his source for the references to Alachua County’s underground rivers, sink holes, and other karst features. Alexander actually goes to each of the four sites referenced in the poem.
March 8, 2008 at 5:30 pm |
The four sites include Shangdu, “which lay in what is now the Zhenglan Banner of the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, in northeast China: capital city of Kubla Khan. Also the holy caves of ice in Kashmir, near Pahalgam, at the northern end of the Lidder valley. Mount Abora of course, associated with the Abyssinian maid, located in east central Africa. The holy site in question is Gishen Mariam, in the Abgasel range, forty miles north of Dessie (Ethiopia). And then Alachua County, Florida. I discuss this siting of Xanadu in Internet Invention (p. 96 ff). Two sources are important: Caroline Alexander, The Way to Xanadu: Journeys to a Legendary Realm (1993)–my source for the details above. Also the classic John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1955). Lowes describes Coleridge’s poetic imagination as working with “hooks and eyes” to make connections among dispersed bits of memory, discourse, history. These are the hooks and eyes of felt. Lowes traces various lines of Coleridge’s poem back to the sources in his readings, including Bartram’s Travels, his source for the references to Alachua County’s underground rivers, sink holes, and other karst features. Alexander actually goes to each of the four sites referenced in the poem.