xxx/ellauri127.html on line 618: A person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in an opiatic dream, but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "person from Porlock", "man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 620: In 1797, Coleridge was living at Nether Stowey, a village in the foothills of the Quantocks. However, due to ill health, he had "retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Lynton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire". It is unclear whether the interruption took place at Culbone Parsonage (Culbone, hehe) or at Ash Farm. (Ass farm, hehe.) He described the incident in his first publication of the poem, writing about himself in the third person:
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 622: On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 624: If there were an actual person from Porlock, it could have been one of many people, including William Wordsworth, Joseph Cottle, or John Thelwall.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 625: It has been suggested by Admiral Schneider (in Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan", University of Chicago Press, 1953), among others, that this prologue, as well as the person from Porlock, was fictional and intended as a credible smokescreen of the poem's apparent lecherous intent when published. It was good old clubfooted Byron that convinced Coleridge to publish it in 1816. The poet Stevie Smith also suggested this view in one of her own poems, saying "the truth is I think, he had already stuck it in there".
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 627: If the Porlock interruption was a fiction, it would parallel the famous "letter from a friend" that interrupts Chapter XIII of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria just as he was beginning a 100-page exposition of the nature of the imagination. It was admitted much later that the "friend" was the author himself. In that case, the invented letter solved the problem that Coleridge found little receptiveness for his philosophy in the England of that time.
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