Orientalism in "Kubla Khan"

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said touches on Coleridge's mysterious "Kubla Khan." The first time I read this poem several years ago, I was pleased with its dense imagery and mystique. I both wanted to travel to and feared the far off Xanadu, "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man" and "Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree" (3-4, 9). Most, if not all, of the imagery belonged to my own unconscious beliefs about the supposed frightening beauty of the Orient. I knew so little about Asian countries (my education came straight from films such as Disney's Alladin and other Orientalist cartoons for children) that I took Coleridge's opium dream to be based in a reality close to the real world. My mistake lay in my lack of education about countries outside of Europe and the United States.

The second time I read "Kubla Khan," I had been educated on the style of the Romantics. It was easier for me to see the poem as a part of a literary movement and ideology, which existed often outside of the real world. Lines like "A savage place ! as holy and enchanted / As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover !" fit into the popular spookiness of the Romantics during the late 1700s (and again a century later) (14-16). While I better understood the poem within its literary context, I still lacked information about its historical and ideological context.

After reading Orientalism, I realized that Coleridge's poem also belongs to a set of underlying ideas about the Orient held by the poet and culture that produced it. Because of the way in which Coleridge claims to have written it, based on a dream, it is all the more clear that the poem is a product of the poet's unconscious attitudes about the Orient. These attitudes were not meant to demean, but to celebrate a land which obviously appealed to Coleridge. Lines like "So twice five miles of fertile ground," "The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves," and

In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me;

call attention to Coleridge's ideas about the invitation of the Orient, as if it existed as something feminine or willing to give itself to Europeans (6, 31-32, 38-44). His image of the fertile land is paralleled by the extended image of a woman trying to seduce him. But these Orientalist images hardly belong to Coleridge. They are repeated throughout Romantic works, as well as many other European and American literary endeavors, and are often currently taken for granted by scholars.