Stuart’s Laureates II 237familiarity (to use Coleridge’s own phrase) from “Kubla Khan” and
compare it with, say, Coleridge’s “Songs of the Pixies” from his 1796
volume—a volume that the English Review found to contain much
“Della Crusca affectation” (174). As David Fairer puts it, this earlier
poem “has an ethereal erotic charge” (166). “Songs of the Pixies”
dates from 1793, and Coleridge identified it in the 1796 volume
explicitly as an “Irregular Ode.” But it also deals with poetic inspira-
tion, vividly recalling the tropes of Della Crusca’s poetry as well as
of Robinson’s: the pixies administer to a “youthful Bard, ‘unknown
to fame’ ” who is as Della Cruscan as he is Coleridgean: this young
poet “Wooes the Queen of solemn thought, / And heaves the gentle
mis’ry of a sigh / Gazing with tearful eye” (Poems 20). The pixies
anoint him with poetic inspiration, singing, “O’er his hush’d soul our
soothing witch’ries shed, / And twine our faery garlands round his
head” (Poems 21). When Robinson praises Coleridge’s “wond’rous
witcheries of song,” she credits not only “Kubla Khan” but “Songs of
the Pixies” as well. And she would have read “Kubla Khan” in light
of the earlier poem.
Robinson’s responding to “Kubla Khan” in a Della Cruscan man-
ner does not in itself make Coleridge’s poem like any of Della Crusca’s,
but we should consider that possibility, especially given Coleridge’s
complicated attitude toward his own poem. What Robinson’s poem
most strikingly reveals is that, as a poem of the 1790s, Coleridge’s
“Kubla Khan” formally most resembles an irregular ode. Indeed,
its metrical variations resemble Robinson’s baroque odes from early
in her career. Harold Bloom points out the influence of William
Collins’ 1747 “Ode on the Poetical Character” as a significant inf lu-
ence on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and its treatment of poetic cre-
ativity (9–10). I would add that Collins’s ode formally inf luenced
“Kubla Khan” as well in its extreme metrical variations and even
in its tripartite structure, although Collins’s is more conventionally
the strophe- antistrophe- epode formula of the classical ode. Collins’s
ode is definitely heterostrophic. And Joseph Warton’s 1746 “Ode to
Fancy” certainly is a significant thematic precursor to “Kubla Khan,”
though its tetrameter couplets are regular where the latter poem is
irregular. While “Kubla Khan” does not have the structural and the-
matic coherence of an ode, it does posses the musicality contempo-
rary readers would have thought of as lyrical, but without, until the
end of the poem, the traditional subjectivity of the lyric.
If we read “Kubla Khan” in the context of Coleridge and
Robinson’s mutual admiration, which is itself a playful rekindling of
Della Cruscan tropes, and as part of their poetic correspondence, we9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2379780230100251_07_ch05.indd 237 12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM
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