The
person from Porlock
was an 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 this visitor 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" are
literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.
Posted because I encountered the term while reading Douglas Adams's
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in which "the title character
saves the world, in part by time-travelling from the present day to
distract Coleridge from properly remembering his dream; if Coleridge had
completed the poem an alien ghost would have 'encoded' certain
information within the completed work that would have allowed him to
make repairs to his spaceship in the past at the cost of wiping out all
life on Earth."
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