Person from Porlock

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The Person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge who called by during his composition of the oriental poem Kubla Khan. Coleridge claimed to have 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) while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "Person from Porlock", "Man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders.

Coleridge was living at Nether Stowey (between Bridgwater and Minehead). It is unclear whether the interruption took place at Culbone Parsonage or at Ash Farm. He described the incident in his first publication of 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!

However, this story is by no means universally accepted by scholars. It has been suggested by Elisabeth Schneider (in Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan", University of Chicago Press, 1953), amongst others, that this prologue, as well as the Person from Porlock, was in fact fictional and intended as a credible explanation of the poem's seemingly fragmentary state as published. [1] The poet Roger McGough also suggested this view in one of his own poems, saying "I think he got stuck"; this may have just been a joke, or maybe, as a poet himself, he knew the feeling.

[edit] References in popular culture

In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a character checks into a motel under the pseudonym A. Person, Porlock, England.

This figure is also referred to in Stevie Smith's poem, 'Thoughts About the Person from Porlock', which begins as a gentle ribbing of Coleridge and ends in a meditation on loneliness, creativity, and depression.

Vincent Starrett, Persons from Porlock & Other Interruptions. (1938)
Stevie Smith, Thoughts about the Person from Porlock. (1960s)
Louis MacNeice, Persons from Porlock, and other plays for radio. (1969)
A. N. Wilson, Penfriends from Porlock. (1988)

Douglas Adams featured Porlock in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The "man from Porlock" is in fact a time-traveller from the present day, who must stop Coleridge from remembering his dream, and so save the world.

"The Person from Porlock" is a science fiction story by Raymond F. Jones published in Astounding magazine in 1947. Coleridge's vision is explained as the remote viewing of a secret colony of aliens living on Earth. One of the aliens deliberately distracts Coleridge before he can write down a full description of the colony.

In Alexei Sayle's short story The Mau Mau Hat (from the collection The Dog Catcher) a man called Emmanuel Porlock visits the narrator, a retired poet, interrupting work on his magnum opus.

During Paul Jenkins's Hellblazer run, John Constantine learned that his ancestor, one James Constantine was "The Person from Porlock". What he does not learn, but the reader does, is that James disrupted Coleridge's opium-sparked dreams so as to prevent a group of angels from feeding Coleridge what ammounted to a propoganda piece for the armies of Heaven.

[edit] Other possible references

In Arthur Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, Holmes is warned about a possible murder by an informant assuming the name 'Porlock' ('Porlock' being the nom-de-plume of an informant within Professor Moriarty's organization). However, Porlock's identity is not revealed, and there is not necessarily any reason to connect him with the town of Porlock. Holmes contacts him through a post office in Camberwell, in London, so the informant cannot be in Porlock. It is likely that Conan Doyle merely borrowed the name from Coleridge.

In J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, a porlock is a small creature with an exceptionally large nose that acts as a guardian to horses. Strangely, they are supposedly found in Dorset, rather than the Somerset of their namesake, even though the two counties are right next to each other.