Editing Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: the lyric as archive

This article draws on unpublished manuscript materials relating to the poetry of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge to develop a lyric reading of the archive. Identifying resemblances between theoretical discussions of the archive and the lyric, the article proposes a model of archival lyric that might bridge the two. It then takes a detailed look at those compositional contexts that the Coleridge archives reveal in order to develop an understanding of archival lyric as collaborative, provisional, and open-ended.