15:02 UTC:

There ought to be a Complete Hypertext Edition of the Works of Coleridge. That's the only way anybody's going to be able to make even the smallest amount of sense of it all. I was just thinking about how the preparations for The Brook didn't really come out strongly in any work except for Kubla Khan and how it was interesting, however, that some bits of letters and so on link in to the whole Quantocks period. This is a bit of a recurring problem when you want to study Coleridge, because aspects of what he's working on come across in all of his works, but all of his works are segregated together based on source. So the poetic works are in one book, and the notebooks are in an inaccessible (i.e. out of print) super volume by Coburn, and then there's the letters elsewhere, and you've got The Friend, and on and on. And none of these are generally linked together by anyone except for the biographers, and they can of course only do it piecemeal.

So what there needs to be is something which collects all of this in one place and shows all the interrelationships in the whole, referencing the biographies and literary studies and so on. It'd be a monumentally huge task, and in many parts quite a thankless one because it wouldn't be right in a sense to just make an anthology of it. Sorta belies the point of having a hypertexted work; though a proof of concept at least might be nice.