Vol. 1 (2025), Issue 2 (June)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated yet incomplete poem Kubla Khan has received mixed reviews, but it remains a quintessential example of Romantic poetry. This article adopts Writer’s Block Theory to explore Coleridge’s writing block, especially during the process of creating Kubla Khan. It argues that Coleridge’s writing block is attributed to a combination of external and internal factors. The external causes are related to the turbulent historical context and his personal struggles, while the internal ones include physiological/affective causes and motivational/cognitive causes. Then the article discusses the representations of Coleridge’s block by analyzing symbolism employed in Kubla Khan as well as the tension between the preface and the poem. Finally, it challenges the notion that writer’s block is entirely negative, arguing how constraints motivated Coleridge to innovate and expand the limits of poetic expression.