The Poet's Mistake

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Description

What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry-and about how we read 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 The Poet's Mistake, critic and poet Erica McAlpine gathers together for the first time numerou

Reviews

"A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021"
"Her book is more than a catalog of howlers; its aim is not to shame poets for their errors but to question critics attempts to explain away those errors at all costs. . . . Maybe if gatekeeping were more rigorous, logrolling less obvious, we could make a stronger case for the greatness of poetry. But McAlpine suggests another tactic: not limiting the number of poems we define as valuable, but amending the way we talk about poems that we do value."---Evan Kindley, New York Review of Books
"The Poet's Mistake is careful and painstaking. . . . McAlpine's cautious approach allows her to make as much of her material as possible, and increasingly lends authority. A reader attempting to catch her out will frequently find that she has already thought of a more convincing explanation."---Graeme Richardson, Times Literary Supplement
"That her central argument poets arent infallible, sometimes mistakes are simply that should be an outlier suggests that an unduly deferential approach to literary criticism has been allowed to proliferate among the towers of learning. . . . [This] book. . . has a useful role to play, albeit in the unlikely cause of bringing poets, or at least their most complaisant enablers, down a peg or two."---Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books
"McAlpine displays a sensitive ear, a command of poetic history, and a critical intelligence that makes fine distinctions clear and meaningful. The Poets Mistake is a model of good academic criticism."---Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine
"McAlpines point is that accuracy is as important in poetry as in fiction, that intentionality, however difficult that might be to determine, is a factor one must consider, and that unconscious mistakes differ from nave errors. . . . This study is convincingly argued, delightfully written, fascinating in its examples, and well worth a careful read." * Choice Reviews *

Author Bio

Erica McAlpine is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow at St Edmund Hall. She is the author of the poetry collection The Country Gambler.