The poem is a product of subconscious fusion of dream images and ideas from Coleridge’s wide reading. Which of the details in the poem do you think are factual, and which imaginary?

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Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is a poem perceived in a dream under the effect of opium intake. However, the poet has adopted certain historical and contemporary facts and transformed or provided them with a space that is completely woven through his sublime and romantic imagination. The poet talks about “a stately pleasure dome”, which was actually built in the Mongolian summer capital by the Emperor of Tartary, Kubla, who was the grandson of Genghis Khan. But Coleridge moves beyond this concrete dome and perceives it a form of beauty encapsulating the forces of nature. He is more drawn to the beauty and sublimity of the gardens, the magical brooks and tinkling streams which are of course the products of his imagination. The setting is again a real one- Xanadu but the horrifying, chaotic picture of the tumultuous, violent, “savage” nature, full of “erotic” feeling of the “wailing woman crying for her demon lover” is again his own romantic fantasy.