Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I've always been fascinated by the story of how Coleridges's poem, Kubla Khan, came to be written.  He was addicted to opium and, one night while reading about Kublai Khan, he fell into a drug-induced stupor.

He woke after about three hours with his head filled with hundreds of lines of vivid poetry.  Writing furiously, he tried to get it all down before it disappeared from his mind, but he was interrupted by the doorbell ringing.  He said later it was 'a man from Porlock' and it was enough of an interruption to drive the rest of the poem from his memory.

What exists is, I believe, one of the great poems of the English language.  I've only included here a couple of fragments.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea.

   A damsel with a dulcimer
   In a vision once I saw:
   It was an Abyssinian maid
   And on her dulcimer she played,
   Singing of Mount Abora.
 

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