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Kubla Khan a Supernatural Poem

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Kubla Khan a Supernatural Poem
| AbstractThis essay discusses the question of the transforming creative self and the aesthetics of becoming in Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's 'Kubla Khan ' and 'Dejection: An Ode ', by reassessing certain strands of Romantic visionary criticism and Deconstruction, which are two major critical positions in the reading and interpreting of Romantic poetry. The poetics of becoming and the creative process place the self in Coleridge 's aesthetic and spiritual idealism in what I have called a constructive deferral, since none of his poetic texts demonstrates the totality of experience or the impossibility of conceptual and theoretical discourse.The aesthetic and spiritual advancement of the self delineates the self as conscious, anti-self-conscious, paradoxical, ironic and self-contradictory. These are the very states that necessitate and enhance change and dynamism rather than portray imaginative failure and impossibility. The two poems therefore display an intertextual relation with regard to the self 's progress towards the attainment of its pursued ideals. |

IntroductionThe aim of this article is to discuss the issue of the transforming creative self as demonstrating a poetics of becoming in Coleridge 's 'Kubla Khan ' and 'Dejection: An Ode, ' [1] against the background of his aesthetic and spiritual idealism and postmodern criticism, especially Deconstruction. This presupposes an innovative intertextual treatment of the poems, intertextuality here not conceived as involving the relation between an author and a precursor expounded by Harold Bloom, but as a subtle elliptical psycho-aesthetic and spiritual mixture between the poems.It will be important, first of all, to define certain key terms like the poetics of becoming and Deconstruction to situate the context in which the concept of the transforming creative self is discussed and analysed. Becoming is defined here as the self-conscious striving towards an aesthetic or transcendental ideal. Taking



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