Man from Porlock
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The Man from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge who called by during his composition of the oriental poem Kubla Khan. Coleridge had perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock (a town in the South West of England, near Exmoor) whilst in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan was never completed. This shows not only the fickle nature of human creativity, but how one small incident can change history. In Coleridge's own words, published with the poem:
- On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
It is possible, of course, that this prologue, as well as the Man from Porlock, is intended to require as much suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader as does the poem itself.
The incident was parodied in the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. In the book, the Man from Porlock is explained as a time-traveller who deliberately prevents Coleridge from completing the poem by breaking his train of thought, in order to save humanity. In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a character checks into a motel under the pseudonym A. Person, Porlock, England.