The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

by John Livingston Lowes

THE ROAD TO XANADU. PREFACE: THE story which this book essays to tell was not of the tellers choosing. I t simply came, with supreme indifference to other plans, and autocratically demanded right of way. A glittering eye and a skinny hand and a long gray beard could not have done more summary execution, nor, for that matter, could the Wedding-Guest himself who also had other fish to fry have been, at the outset, a more reluctant auditor. But the reluctance swiftly passed into absorbing interest, as the meaning of the chance glimpse which did the business was disclosed. For the agency which cast the spell was not, as it happened, a pair of marvellous fairy-tales at all, nor even the provocative and baffling personality of their creator. It was the imaginative energy itself, surprised as it seemed to me at work behind these fabrics of its weaving. If I Gas right, and if I could make clear to others what I thought I saw myself, I had no alternative. That the aperpi, such as it was, should come through The Ancient Mariner, when I wasintent at the moment upon Chaucers rich humanity, was, to be sure, more than a little disconcerting. It was so, however, that it chose to come, and Wyrd goeth as she will. Once started on, however, the story has been written in its present form I fear I. must confess quite frankly for the writers own enjoyment - in part for the sheer pleasure of following into unfamiliar regions an almost untrodden path not a little for that fearful joy one snatches from the effort to exhibit, with something that approaches clarity, the order which gives meaning to a chaos of details. It would have been easy in comparison to communicate, for the edification of a narrow circle only, a mass of observations to the pages of some learned journal, and let it go at that. But the subject in itself was far too interesting, and the light it seemed to throw upon a wider field far too significant, to warrant any but the broadest treatment I could give it. I am not sure, indeed, that one of the chief services which literary scholarship can render is not precisely the attempt, at least, to make its findings available and interesting, if that may be beyond the precincts of its own solemn troops and sweet societies. At all events, that is the adventurous enterprise of this volume. Its facts I think I can safely vouch for. As for the interpretation thereof, that is the core of the book...

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Romanticism, Travel, Books About Books

654 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 4, 1927

Reviews

[Damaskcat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read The Road to Xanadu more than forty years ago because an English teacher recommended it to us when we were studying Coleridge. I remember being totally bowled over by it and it has lost none of its interest even after all this time. The author set out to trace how Coleridge's imagination worked through studying his notebooks and tracing their contents to their sources and by reference to the finished versions of his two long poems - 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'.

The book is dense but not incomprehensible and what it shows is the way Coleridge's imagination worked on what he read - and absorbed and digested it and then produced it in the form of some of the best known poetry in the English language. Coleridge was an voracious reader and he kept voluminous notebooks of scraps of information and ideas which appealed to him. He often read books and followed up their sources - even down to reading footnotes and then reading the books those footnotes referred to and the author of this book follows his trail.

The book is more literary detective story than literary criticism and as such will appeal to anyone who enjoys tracking things down to their source. It is also a fascinating study of the ways in which the human imagination works on words and phrases and turns them into poetry.

Only about half the book is text, the rest is taken up with notes on sources and an index. It would be possible from following up the notes to trace the route the author and Coleridge himself took through the books available at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It takes slow and careful reading to really appreciate the marvellous work contained in this unique book.

[Dan Clore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating study of the probable sources of Coleridges masterpieces "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", going over his years of reading deeply and widely in many subject, and detailing how this material appears in verbal echoes in the poems.

The material at hand is generally interesting in and of itself--"For we shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus--with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons, and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the daemons of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus; haloes and hurricanes; lightnings and Laplanders; meteors, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons, and the Wandering Jew. Beside the compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodical. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry."

While Lowe's method has often been disdained as paedantic source-hunting, leading to the pejorative label Xanaduism, it may have provided William Burroughs (who cited it as his favorite work of lit crit) with hints for his own textual practices, and generally provides an important precursor to theories of intertextuality.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I found this book worthwhile, and even inspiring at times, there's no doubt Lowe's style made the reading arduous. Tracking the influences on Samuel Taylor Coleridge as he wrote his two masterworks--The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan--Lowes hopes to give a picture of how the imagination works. But I suspect that years of reading the same source material that Coleridge did--not to mention his study of Chaucer unrelated to this book--imbued him with a kind of prose echolalia. Perhaps not; this book (based on a series of lectures) was published in the 1920's, and there was still quite a bit of this sort of peroration going on.

Still, despite the difficulty I had in getting into the spirit of his writing, I would highly recommend the book to anyone studying Coleridge or his poetry. There are certainly other benefits to this highly specialized study, more general in nature, which may also appeal, but which really are too numerous for a quick review. Suffice it to say that Lowes touches on so many different subjects on his way around Coleridge's poetry that it would be odd if there wasn't something to catch every eye, if one were to persevere to the end of the book.

I think I've picked up some of that echolalia myself. At any rate, recommended, if your interest veers in this direction at all.

[Peter Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book of detection using the books that Coleridge read to unravel the creation and development of perhaps the most famous poem in history”The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.Not a book for the casual reader but certainly for the enthusiast or specialist.