In Somerset did Kubla Khan: Coleridge manuscript returns to poem’s source

Tom Mayberry reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan poem, on display at the Museum of Somerset, Taunton. Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian

More than two centuries after Samuel Taylor Coleridge awoke from a drug-addled reverie – if the story is to be totally believed – to pen his great poem Kubla Khan, the only version of the work in the writer’s own hand has returned to the corner of south-west England that inspired him.

The unique manuscript is the centrepiece of a new exhibition on Coleridge at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton, close to the hills and valleys he and William Wordsworth roamed at the end of the 18th century.