Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

by John Livingston Lowes

Every traveler journeys to a place not shown on a map and reports back from a location known only to himself. That is one reason, and one, why the most deply involving travel-book I can remember reading, and one of the most hypnotic detective stories, too, throwing off its excitement like an incandescent flare, is, in fact, a work of literary criticism: The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes. Brought back to life by Picador Books in London in the mid-’70s but too often forgotten, it is the tale of a professor of Chaucer burrowing for a reference to Purchas in the British Museum, soon after World War I, who suddenly stumbles upon a notebook of Coleridge’s printed only in an obscure periodical about German philology. In it he finds a phrase that reminds him of “Kubla Khan,” a fragment that evokes the Ancient Mariner, and before he knows it, with an explorer’s sense of serendipity, he is being led through the subterranean passageways, down into the corners and past the half- formed stalagmites of the poet’s haunted imagination, seeing how this phrase of Bartram’s and that book of Erasmus’ somehow coalesced in the sleeping man’s mind to make something utterly his own.

The poems themselves, steeped in opium and talismanic in their cadences, have long cast a spell over every kind of reader–Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, claimed to find another source for the Mariner in an old Elizabethan journey. And Coleridge, of course, was the British poet most responsible for bringing over formal theories of the Imagination and the Fancy from German Romanticism. But just as the bard tended to live out his ideas more compellingly than he formulated them, so a professor a hundred years later got waylaid from his ostensible theme and tumbled down a trap door into the subconscious. The Road to Xanadu begins to outline the contours of the mind–to show how the imagination works (in both subject and author)–more vividly than anything in Freud; but what makes it ultimately enduring is that it performs an act we usually associate with religious texts: It casts a light upon mystery while respecting the fact that the essence of the sublime will always remain far beyond our reckoning.

Pico Iyer
The Los Angeles Times, 26 December 1999

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Romanticism, Travel, Books About Books

614 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 1927

Reviews

[Damaskcat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read The Road to Xanadu more than forty years ago because an English teacher recommended it to us when we were studying Coleridge. I remember being totally bowled over by it and it has lost none of its interest even after all this time. The author set out to trace how Coleridge's imagination worked through studying his notebooks and tracing their contents to their sources and by reference to the finished versions of his two long poems - 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'.

The book is dense but not incomprehensible and what it shows is the way Coleridge's imagination worked on what he read - and absorbed and digested it and then produced it in the form of some of the best known poetry in the English language. Coleridge was an voracious reader and he kept voluminous notebooks of scraps of information and ideas which appealed to him. He often read books and followed up their sources - even down to reading footnotes and then reading the books those footnotes referred to and the author of this book follows his trail.

The book is more literary detective story than literary criticism and as such will appeal to anyone who enjoys tracking things down to their source. It is also a fascinating study of the ways in which the human imagination works on words and phrases and turns them into poetry.

Only about half the book is text, the rest is taken up with notes on sources and an index. It would be possible from following up the notes to trace the route the author and Coleridge himself took through the books available at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It takes slow and careful reading to really appreciate the marvellous work contained in this unique book.

[Dan Clore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating study of the probable sources of Coleridges masterpieces "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", going over his years of reading deeply and widely in many subject, and detailing how this material appears in verbal echoes in the poems.

The material at hand is generally interesting in and of itself--"For we shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus--with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons, and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the daemons of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus; haloes and hurricanes; lightnings and Laplanders; meteors, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons, and the Wandering Jew. Beside the compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodical. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry."

While Lowe's method has often been disdained as paedantic source-hunting, leading to the pejorative label Xanaduism, it may have provided William Burroughs (who cited it as his favorite work of lit crit) with hints for his own textual practices, and generally provides an important precursor to theories of intertextuality.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I found this book worthwhile, and even inspiring at times, there's no doubt Lowe's style made the reading arduous. Tracking the influences on Samuel Taylor Coleridge as he wrote his two masterworks--The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan--Lowes hopes to give a picture of how the imagination works. But I suspect that years of reading the same source material that Coleridge did--not to mention his study of Chaucer unrelated to this book--imbued him with a kind of prose echolalia. Perhaps not; this book (based on a series of lectures) was published in the 1920's, and there was still quite a bit of this sort of peroration going on.

Still, despite the difficulty I had in getting into the spirit of his writing, I would highly recommend the book to anyone studying Coleridge or his poetry. There are certainly other benefits to this highly specialized study, more general in nature, which may also appeal, but which really are too numerous for a quick review. Suffice it to say that Lowes touches on so many different subjects on his way around Coleridge's poetry that it would be odd if there wasn't something to catch every eye, if one were to persevere to the end of the book.

I think I've picked up some of that echolalia myself. At any rate, recommended, if your interest veers in this direction at all.

[Peter Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book of detection using the books that Coleridge read to unravel the creation and development of perhaps the most famous poem in history”The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.Not a book for the casual reader but certainly for the enthusiast or specialist.