The request for your thoughts, in verse or prose, on who the Person from Porlock might have been (assuming, of course, that there was such a person) drew a large and inventive entry. Many thanks to John McGivering, who suggested this excellent competition.
Some fingered, as De Quincey did, Coleridge’s doctor and laudanum source, but also in the frame were Jehovah’s Witnesses, PPI ambulance-chasers and the drugs squad.
And many of you agreed with Stevie Smith’s assessment, in her poem ‘Thoughts about the Person from Porlock’:
‘As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.’
The winners take £25 each; George Simmers nabs £30.
George Simmers
The English team at Porlock Uni prides itself on being critically proactive, so when we took the faculty’s tardis to 1797 Nether Stowey, we meant business.
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