One of the most colourful volumes of literary scholarship ever given to the world is a study of the working of Coleridge's imagination, ‘an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials – an adventure like a passage through the mazes of a labyrinth, to come out at last upon a wide and open sky’. Now more than half a century old, The Road to Xanadu was composed in a style that has rather fallen out of fashion. Hardly any smart critics today write even like G. Wilson Knight, and post-structuralism has cultivated its own arcane splendours of language to overshadow the rococo magnificence of Xanadu's mesmerizing rhetoric. Celebrated for a generation at Harvard with a Gilbertian tribute –

Lowes offered accounts of the poet's imagination of such spellbinding authority that we listen like a three-year's child while the critic has his will: