As in Archive Fever and Of Spirit, Derrida's later work pushes the themes of the archive, the ghost and remembrance in general. He questions both the possibility of returning to true beginnings through the archive and the authorities that determine the meaning of what gets reanimated and preserved. My interest lies in his thought's relation to poetry, and through visits to the very archive of Derrida's personal library at Princeton, I explore Derrida's collection of poetry and imagine what he would have to say about a young student perusing his posthumous collection. His archive offers invaluable insight into the exact texts of poetry that informed his thought. And especially in regard to Martin Heidegger's continual emphasis on the originary meaning of the poetry of Parmenides, Hölderlin and Trakl, Derrida's archive highlights the difficulty in arriving at a precise arché or first principle, whether it is of an oeuvre or of a poem.