09 may 2026
I’m reading Tsur’s ‘Kubla Khan’: Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality and Cognitive Style. I received my copy from the library, and found in it some splendid psychoanalysis.
The challenge of reading Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, is that it is a short piece with much ambiguity that becomes nearly impossible to parse. Victorian readers insisted that its value was melodic; therefore, there is much meta-literature on the quality of reading the work. This allows the author Tsur to focus on the aesthetic quality of the piece’s “absorption”: as Tsur tries to clarify as an investigation into the “personality variable ‘absorption’: devised to predict hypnotic susceptibility…”
The complex-aesthetic piece of Kubla Khan can be surmised with Tsur’s interpretation: “The present book propounds one possible interpretation: ‘Kubla Khan’ as a romantic nature poem that assumes a hypnotic-ecstatic quality.” He explains his terse interpretation as he shares analytical philosophical approach that “criticism cannot offer a ‘true’ interpretation, only what is ‘merely possible.’ And that he adopts Kenneth Burke’s notion that “the use of language as a symoblic means of inducing co-operation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” And some critics have said about Kubla Khan as “meaningless farrago of sonorous phases beneath the notice of serious criticism . . . while other readers find a charm.”
Relying on Snyder’s notion of the “hypnotic” or “trance-inductive” poetry, the “charm” of the poem can be better understand as poetry that draws attention away from the contents to the sound of the poetry as “verablized-music.” Thus Tsur finds “low-absorption readers” tend to effect poetic closure whenever possible, while high-absorption readers tend to leave shapes open. Tsur speculates that such different inclinations to organize poetic texts into stronger or weaker shapes may crucially affect the perception of the rich pre-categorical auditory information that conveys the speech sounds: the weaker the shapes, the more active and the more diffuse is the pre-categorial auditory information. Thus low-absorption readers are bored by such poems while high-absorption aren’t.
Tsur also believes that the Zeitgeist impacts interest and interpretation.
He also thinks “cognitive style”: “style” in this phrase suggest that decisions made by a reader or a critic are not mere whims of taste but display some significant consistency, governed by certain principals if not “rules.” He cites how psychological studies suggest that “one’s personality and emotional needs determine, to a large extent, what one perceives.” This causes Tsur to pause on how some people arrive at certain interpretations, finding that some students are hostile towards any ambiguity, leading him to discover the concept of a phenomenon called “intolerance of ambiguity.” His solution is to try to find “negative capability” as defined by Keats in his poetic journal – “the ability to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . . and to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”