Poet's Mistake

<p><b>What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry--and about how we read</b> <p/>Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth's lakes. Poetry--even by the greats--is rife with mistakes. In <i>The Poet's Mistake</i> critic and poet Erica McAlpine gathers together for the first time numerous instances of these errors from well-known historical gaffes to never-before-noticed grammatical incongruities misspellings and solecisms. But unlike the many critics and other readers who consider such errors felicitous or essential to the work itself she makes a compelling case for calling a mistake a mistake arguing that denying the possibility of error does a disservice to poets and their poems. <p/>Tracing the temptation to justify poets' errors from Aristotle through Freud McAlpine demonstrates that the study of poetry's mistakes is also a study of critical attitudes toward mistakes which are usually too generous--and often at the expense of the poet's intentions. Through remarkable close readings of Wordsworth Keats Browning Clare Dickinson Crane Bishop Heaney Ashbery and others <i>The Poet's Mistake</i> shows that errors are an inevitable part of poetry's making and that our responses to them reveal a great deal about our faith in poetry--and about how we read.</p>