A strong hebdomadal

This first round of hebdomadals yielded several outstanding essays: you are, as a group, strong readers with a taste for risky argumentation. This makes me very happy.

One of these strong examples comes from Silqet (305), whose answer to the "Kubla Khan" prompt from last week struck me as subtle and persuasive:

The argument presented is that the preface to the poem “Kubla Kahn”, those nine to ten lines, is itself better than the poem in its entirety. I would argue that this is in fact true on a number of different grounds. This argument may not seem viable to Coleridge himself if he read this but due to the fact that the rest of us are not suffering from the same type of opium induced sleep and dreams it is likely one may hold this opinion. The poem, while well-crafted in its rhyme-flowing style, comes from the dreams of a man who simply had a vision and began to write on it yet left the reader completely and utterly devoid of any solution or resolution with his piece. The small preface is able to in its few lines complete a thought and idea and come full circle as opposed to the poem itself where the reader is presented in the beginning with a vision of this magical place where, “gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree”(ln 8-9), only to be left hanging at the end with an incomplete story as to the “ancestral voices prophesying war” (ln 30) and how any of that made a point or created a piece worth publishing as a poem rather than just an brief vision from a man with an opium induced dream. The preface creates an entire image for the reader. It gives this vision of these small droplets or “circlets”, each “mis-shape”[ing] each other from a disturbance such as a person or rock.. However, one comes to realize that all is not lost in this disturbance but that it will all soon come back together to form this “smoothness” which will again unite each small droplet to become this full vision of a mirror which you are able to see and produce visions within. The message is that even through a disturbance or interruption that there is no need to lose hope in things. The “stream will soon renew” just as “The visions will return!”. This small preface offers more to a sober reader who is looking to truly take something from a piece rather than just a taste of a vision of heaven on acid at the hand of a un-finishing, drug induced poet writing with the fury of a mad man at his vision never to fully comprehend the idea or cause of the poem. The poem, even as it flows with this eloquent rhyme style, leads the reader down these “meandering”, “measureless to man” “caverns” with no real vision or formal thought (ln 25,27). The end of the poem leaves the reader with two lines that just reinforce that the poet is and was not in his right mind and thus created this unsatisfying piece of work we now call “Kubla Khan”.

The strongest move Silqet makes in this argument is to articulate how the preface to "Kubla Khan" makes a claim for what counts as good poetry, and then to apply this claim to the poem itself. This argument is, in miniature, what an answer to the third prompt for the formal essay assignment might do: develop a close reading of the gloss and then apply the result of that reading to the text itself.