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Hello, this is Jack in 2025, reaching deep into the archives for this one, all the way back to

July 2016 by special listener request. Apparently, this one hit its target and left its mark. It's our

episode on Coleridge, Creativity, and the notorious person from Poor Lock, who interrupted

Coleridge in mid-poetic reverie. We're bringing this episode to you in its entirety. Without commercial interruption,

I hope you enjoy it. Hello. One day in 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two

grains of opium and retired to his room for a nap. When he awoke, he had in his head the remnants of a marvelous dream,

a vivid train of images of the Chinese emperor Kupla Khan and his summer palace, Zanadu.

The vision transformed itself into lines of poetry, but as he started writing it down,

he was interrupted by a person from Parlock,

who arrived at Coleridge's cottage on business and stayed for an hour.

When Coleridge returned to his work, the vision had been lost, and the fragmentary nature

of the poem Kubla Khan has haunted its admirers ever since.

The resentment has centered around the bumbling person from Porlock, whose visit remains

shrouded in mystery. The scholar Jonathan Livingston Lowe's put it bluntly. If there is any man in the

history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, he wrote, it is the man on business

from Porlock. Who was this person from Porlock, and what was he doing knocking on the door of Coleridge's cottage?

How did Coleridge handle the interruption? And what did it mean for him and his art?

And finally, what might we take from this vivid legend today?

We're digging into a 220-year-old literary mystery today on the History of Literature.

Thank you. Okay.

Today's a fun one, a rabbit hole I dove into, and I was surprised by what I found.

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