The debate over the fragmentary nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" has continued since the time the poem was written from 1797 to the present. Some critics consider "Kubla Khan" to be a complete work in its entirety, while others argue that it is simply an unfinished fragment, a curiosity. The reductionist view of “Kubla Khan” as an incomplete novelty does Coleridge a disservice. On the other hand, Coleridge's own description of his poem as a fragment, as well as the chaotic disconnection of the poem itself, make it difficult to call the work finished in a conventional sense. Instead, “Kubla Khan” might represent the author's own understanding of the mysterious and fractured world of the Orient. The Romantics were deeply fascinated by the Orient and always described it as a dense, elusive myth rather than a real place. Western romantics portrayed Easterners as primitive, morally underdeveloped, and unchanging, but they were intensely attracted to the Orient precisely because it offered an alternative to the West. In this “othering” of the Orient, the Romantics shaped a vision of Orientals that reflected their own culture, rather than basing their perceptions on a legitimate truth about the Orient. The Orient has become the paradoxically attractive symbol of the darkest and most sinister elements of Western society – an amalgamated fragment based on Western projection and desire. The orientalism evident in “Kubla Khan” is still relevant today as a prism through which to view modern texts such as the film “Citizen Kane.” Modern interpretations of Orientalism have been expanded to include not only the racialized and different Other, but also aspects of the Self. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayThe fragmentation of the Orient is twofold. First, filtered through the subjective prism of Orientalism, Western knowledge of the Orient will always be incomplete. And second, although the orientalist attempts to write about the Orient, he also deliberately and consciously separates himself from it, so that he is intrinsically separate from the subject of his text. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is a poetic embodiment of the Romantic fragment, what ES Shaffer calls an "epic fragment." In his poem, Coleridge includes a preface titled “From the Fragment of Kubla Khan.” The word "fragment" refers to the poem itself, which he considers a "psychological curiosity" rather than a finished work, but it also refers to Coleridge's own inability to capture the entirety of the images which " appeared before him like things... without any consciousness of effort. While asleep in an opium trance, Coleridge's mind, as if possessed, composed for him "two or three hundred verses", so that when he awoke, the poem already existed as a whole - "that which had originally been, as it were, given for him." His duty as a poet is therefore simply to remember and record what was already a complete composition. However, the perfect vision which appears to the poet while he is unconscious mysteriously dissipates once he attempts to capture it, like the fragment of which the romantic artist has a subconscious understanding but whose completion will invariably elude possibility Just as the poet does. decrees and then creates the lines of his poem, thus "To Xanadu, Kubla Khan/a majestic decree from the pleasure dome Fred."L. Milne states: "If indeed 'Kubla Khan' became... a poem about the creative process set in the general context of the mind and its activities, then where... is the creative power to be found? poem, this function is best fulfilled by Kubla Khan himself, for it is he alone who creates in the mindscape. The orientalist studies the Orient to distinguish himself from it, and his writings are proof that it exists outside of him.his text. Coleridge enters the fantasy world of Xanadu but establishes in the first line of the poem that it is about Kubla Khan, the Muslim leader of the Mongol Empire, and not Coleridge, the Western poet. Coleridge is only a visitor to a world already decreed for him; he consciously fragments himself from the subject of his work. The tone of the poem reflects the amazed and bewildered narrator, who finds himself in a bizarre and foreign land that fascinates him simply because he cannot fully understand it. The poem is made up of images that emerge and the reader is meant to let the images speak for themselves. Attempting to analyze or explain the strange and mystifying Eastern world would yield nothing in translation, because the rational Western observer cannot, thanks to his rationalism, understand the emotional, occult and spiritualist Orient. The "caverns beyond measure for man" reflect the immeasurability of Xanadu's chimerical landscape, and the poet's continued use of contradictory language, such as "sunny...ice caves" and "I would build this dome in the air", recalls the difficulty that rational and deductive Western language encounters when it attempts to describe the foreign Orient. Western language must resort to logically incomprehensible paradoxes to evoke the logically incomprehensible Orient. Kubla Kahn says he would “build this dome in the air”; Coleridge, the poet, constructs his because he presupposes the symbolic meaning of the Asian images he represents. The England in which Coleridge lived had designated meanings for images like the oriental harem, filled with women who play dulcimers, odalisques who cry for their demonic lovers, and the Abyssian virgins who sing of heaven. The poem that rose beneath Coleridge's sleeping eyelids was constructed in the air of his imagination. Despite its extravagant and outlandish images, the Western reader legitimizes this baseless work because he or she had already rejected the Oriental as inherently different—and inferior—to the rational, virtuous European. Because the Oriental lived in a world entirely his own and such a world was by definition paradoxical to Western principles, Eastern images did not need to be understood or even tolerated by the West. . Coleridge asks the readers of “Kubla Khan” to act as spectators like him rather than as participants. He invites readers into Xanadu by drawing on the “built in the open” clichés and conventions that are already part of the Western vocabulary used to designate and signify the Orient. The use of paradoxical but corresponding opposites in his poetry is what Richard Harter Fogle calls the romantic "picturesque", a combination of paradoxical images that are resolved through a process of meaning that relies on the reader's mind – interprets the symbols. The paradoxical picturesque reappears in its modern form in Orson Welles' seminal film Citizen Kane, which shows visual fragments of Charles Foster Kane's life - from childhood to death - with the aim of conveying to the audience an idea of ​​his character. Of course, at the end of the film, the moral of the story is that Kane's life remains a mystery despite playing out entirely on the big screen, and that it is perhaps impossible to fully explain life..