Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English Romantic poet, essayist, and critic best known for his early poems written during his association with William Wordsworth. He collaborated with Wordsworth on the volume Lyrical Ballads (1798), which included his most famous single poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge called “Kubla Khan” (1816) a fragment, saying that the poem came to him in a dream (earlier in 1797), but that he was interrupted by a visitor while writing it down and so could not recover the rest of it.

Coleridge wrote the poem under the influence of opium. The poet creates a fantastic world and explores " the depths of dreams and creates landscapes that could not exist in reality". The “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” represents the fantastic world which fascinates the speaker about the legendary place where the king Kubla Khan lives.