3-096-580 - Ware in the World/Heritage Images

Porlock, Somerset, c1955. The "person on business from Porlock" was an apocryphal unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem "Kubla Khan" in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by a visitor who came "on business from Porlock" while in the process of writing it. "Kubla Khan", only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "person from Porlock", "man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" has come to be a literary allusion to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.