6. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

One of the most famous opening lines in poetry begins “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…” The renowned poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the lines in 1797 while he was staying in a farmhouse in rural England. Coleridge was a prodigious user of the drug laudanum, and as the story goes, he fell asleep while reading a book about the Far East and actually dreamed the lines of a poem. Upon waking, Coleridge scribbled down the first 50 or so lines while still in an opium haze, but was interrupted when an unexpected visitor called on him about some business. Coleridge was only gone for an hour or so, but when he returned his vision for an epic 300-line poem had faded from memory. Coleridge attempted to get back to work, but eventually gave up out of frustration, and “Kubla Khan” remains perhaps the most famous unfinished poem ever written.