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Cellphone as Porlock: Coleridge in the Digital Age
Who's Porlock? Just about every literate person will recognize "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree..." and most have heard the story behind it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in an opium trance. He started writing that beautiful poem. Fifty-two equally splendid lines followed- but Coleridge was interrupted by a knock on the door, from a "person on business from Porlock," according to Coleridge's notes...
And by the time he got back to his poem, he had lost it - leaving us just the fragment.
Some cynics claim that Coleridge made up the whole incident to explain his…
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