Quality of poetry is not always measured by skill in rhyme or verse, and the abstract beauty of a poem became appreciable partly thanks to the delirious writing of "Kubla Kahn." Samuel Taylor Coleridge is considered an intellectual center of the English Romantic movement, as he felt that imagination was the "living power and prime agent of all human perception." Although his unusually unorganized and often uncompleted poems were not well-received at the time of his life from 1772-1834, his poems are now praised as a perfect combination of reality and fantasy as in the questionable albatross in his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and of emotion and thought. "Kubla Kahn" deals more with the emotion and imagination, while it does mix reality and fantasy, but it has been dismissed even by Coleridge himself as "a sort of reverie," and only a "psychological experiment." Coleridge's relatively unhappy life began in Devon, England, and was marked by his father's death at age ten, and subsequent schooling in which he felt desperately lonely. Gambling debt and failed romance pushed him to enlist in the army, later to return to Oxford University only to fail to graduate. Coleridge also had an unsuccessful marriage and a hostile end to a great friendship with poet William Woodsworth. Coleridge took opium as a remedy for a chronic illness, but soon became addicted and was not able to control his habit until right before his death in 1834, which was also onset by opium.
             In 1797, Coleridge took a dose of opium while reading an account of the Chinese emperor Kubla Kahn and fell into a profound sleep, or possibly hallucination, in which he claims to have composed two to three hundred lines of poetry without any effort. When he woke up, he immediately wrote down those lines he remembered, until he was called out on business and later could not remember the rest. "Kubl...