"Kubla Khan" has been Referenced by...
Films — Live-Action
- Citizen Kane: Kane names his Florida estate Xanadu. The narrator of the newsreel even quotes the opening lines of the poem.
Literature
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: Coleridge received visions from an alien intelligence and subsequently wrote down their instructions coded within the poem. In order to stop the aliens' plans from coming to fruition, during the Time Travel shenanigans near the end of the book, Dirk busts in on Coleridge, pretending to be a visitor from Porlock, and distracts him long enough to make him forget the end of the poem before he can write it down.
- Thank You, Jeeves (by P. G. Wodehouse): Pauline Stoker references a line from the poem, (a woman "wailing for her demon lover") but neither she nor Bertie Wooster can remember the poem's title.
Music
- Frankie Goes to Hollywood: The first lines of the poem are quoted on the title track of Welcome To the Pleasure Dome, with the word "decree" replaced with "erect" (said with extra emphasis).
- Rush: Their classic hit "Xanadu" (from their album A Farewell to Kings) is a Whole-Plot Reference to "Kubla Khan."
Tabletop Games
- Promethean: The Created: It implies that the poem was the result of a qashmal influencing Coleridge, while the "person from Porlock" was a Promethean who sensed the qashmal and felt he needed to prevent its goal from coming to pass.
Video Games
- Fallen London: The franchise references the poem in several places throughout, with the most obvious one being the title of the sequel game, Sunless Sea.
- Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997): The poem's opening is quoted by the Carmen note in Mongol China.
Miscellaneous
- Both the Xanadu Shared Universe and the in-universe "Kublai Con" fan convention (and the In-Series Nickname for said convention's location, which is always "Xanadu") are named after the poem.
