The Poet's Mistake

Abstract

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. This book 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, the book 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. Tracing the temptation to justify poets' errors from Aristotle through Freud, the book 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 close readings of Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Clare, Dickinson, Crane, Bishop, Heaney, Ashbery, and others, the book 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.