thumb|270px|[[Porlock village, Somerset, England.]]
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.
Story
In 1797, Coleridge lived at Nether Stowey, a village in the foothills of the Quantocks. However, due to ill health, he "retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Lynton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire". It is unclear whether the incident took place at Culbone Parsonage or at Ash Farm. Coleridge described the interruption in his first publication of the poem, writing about himself in the third person: