Coleridge's Pants

It is interesting to reflect that John Betjeman was one of C. S. Lewis's first students. They didn't get along.

Even humour separated the two men, and Betjeman complained peevishly that his tutor had forever ruined Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' by wondering whether the 'pants' in the line, 'As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,' were made of wool or fur.

Betjeman would really have hated this blog.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of 'The English Athens', by John Dougill. (Univ. Michigan Press, 1998.)