Robert F. Fleissner '53 is the author of Sources, Meaning, and Influences of Coleridge's Kubla Khan: Xanadu Re-Routed, A Study in the Ways of Romantic Variety, a detailed investigative approach to what has been called "the world's most documented short poem," and certainly one of the most enigmatic. Fleissner, a longtime faculty member of Central State University in Ohio, "brings together the extensive scholarship written in the past seventy years to illuminate the literary, biographical and historial contexts that may have influenced Coleridge's composition."

Reviews

"A broad but intensive study of Coleridge's (1772-2834) short poem in which Fleissner finds inspirations for its content, structure, and imagery. He provides the text to begin with, then juxtaposes it against other poems and works of literature. Among these topics are whether the daemon lover in the poem is really a tutelary agent, From Tartary to Abyssinia, remasquing Poe's red death, Elizabeth Bowen's demon lover, Orson Welles' movies, drugs and Oz, and recapturing the dream vision." -Booknews