Samuel Purchas

Samuel Purchas, was an English cleric who published several volumes of traveler reports of foreign countries.
Purchas his Pilgrimage was one of the sources of inspiration for the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As a note to Coleridge's poem explains, "In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: 
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In the 15th Century, Samuel Purchas wrote of Xanadu in his travel diaries, books that fascinated Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1798 Coleridge wrote a poem called "Kubla Khan" based on what he read in books that were ancient even then.
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