Episode 97: Kubla Khan

David Grubbs holds forth with Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour about "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge's particular philosophy of poetry comes across strongly in this conversation, as does the history of the poem and especially its larger-than-verse backstory. Among other things we take on the connections between drug abuse, madness, and art; the category "Romantic Poetry;" the ideology of the prophet-poet; and Orientalism as it manifests in "Kubla Khan."