The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

The pursuit of the works that shaped a loved writer’s mind can be fascinating in itself. One of the most remarkably odd and yet enlightening books in the history of literary criticism is a thick, square tome by John Livingston Lowes called The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. The book, which was published in 1927 and in the editions I’ve seen runs to seven hundred pages or so, is a simple inquiry into what Samuel Taylor Coleridge read that found its way into his poem “Kubla Khan.” The inventory that Lowes creates is one of the most wonderfully bizarre miscellanies imaginable. To take but one example, consider the poem’s great wild fountain: And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, Amighty fountain momently was forced: A mid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river.* It turns out that Coleridge didn’t come up with this image on his own, but rather took it from a popular book of the eighteenth century commonly called Bartram’s Travels. William Bartram is the author, and the book’s full title is Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil a...