The poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge is an extremely beautiful example of the Romantic belief regarding creative thinking and the creative process. It is a whimsical look at the nature of the unconscious and the art of inspiring and holding on to the imagination that has captivated many for its musical and lyrical nature. Although deemed largely unfinished and incomplete by some scholars and the author himself, Kubla Khan has maintained its position as a literary masterpiece of its time due to its impeccable structure, vivid imagery, unquestionable style, and, above all, lasting impression of both confusions. and leaves his audience in awe. The strange, almost stream-of-consciousness style of Kubla Khan is best understood when illuminated by the strange background of the poem. It is said that Coleridge, after turning to opium and reading Purchas, His Pilgramage by Samuel Purchas, slipped into a hallucinatory, drug-induced vision in which he dreamed of the infamous Mongol leader, Kublai Khan, and "could not have composed less of two to three hundred lines of poetry". The first lines of Coleridge's poem ("In to that.") as it is easy to see where Coleridge drew his inspiration from. When he awoke, Coleridge enthusiastically began to write his new poem, but was interrupted when a "Porlock business person" took him away from his work. Upon his return, Coleridge attempted to finish writing his poem, but unfortunately was unable to remember the rest (Coleridge 156). The story of Kubla Khan is vital to understanding the meaning of the work as a… medium of paper. .....the lifeless ocean. This phrase has been deemed by some critics to be useless and irrelevant to the rest of the poem and worthy of being overlooked, however, meaning can be gleaned from its use (insert). A possible meaning of this vague line could lie in the images preceding it. Throughout Kubla Khan, the Alpha River, a symbol of unbridled creative inspiration, is constantly contained by caves described in the poem as dark, deep, and immeasurable. The “turmoil” felt by Khan could be the struggle between the energy of the river: artistic creation, and the cold and confining nature of the caves: raw rationality, the enemy, but equal, of art (insert). This confrontation between two opposing forces can be described as nothing less than a battle, and the “ancestral voices” belong to those great creators who have lived and witnessed the ongoing and inevitable war.)