determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it.
Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you
please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their
approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the
poetic art of "Kubla Khan."

In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed before, and
not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new
supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the
whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its
own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the
known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses
its strangeness; the shiver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding-
guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new
creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan,"
Coleridge saw the images "as _things_"; only a mind so overshadowed by
dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so;
and, with such a mind, "that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment,
which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The
excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency,
"supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human
being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed
himself under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally
to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically,
disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from
imaginary which is part of the ordinary attitude of man in the presence of
mystery.