{"title":"Misremembering Seamus Heaney","authors":"E. McAlpine","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.12","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter assesses the work of Seamus Heaney, another semiautobiographical poet whose work nevertheless presses on the boundaries of fact. Heaney's poetry often raises the question of whether, or how, remembered experience differs from historical reality. Can memory—and, in particular, memory as revealed through poetry—have a knowledge separate from what happened? Reflecting on conceptions of memory developed by Wordsworth, a poet with whom Heaney identifies on multiple levels but whose poetry he occasionally misremembers, the chapter argues for the necessity of acknowledging mistake even as it pertains to aspects of a remembered life, fictional or not. The act of misremembering emerges as a technique for Heaney—as well as for other poets—to figure the difficulty of mapping the imagination onto a historical world.","PeriodicalId":163507,"journal":{"name":"The Poet's Mistake","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116237258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hart Crane’s Wrapture","authors":"E. McAlpine","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.10","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter reads Hart Crane's extreme license with words against stricter conceptions of error. For instance, in the second section of his poem “Voyages,” he describes the sea as “Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love”—his odd spelling of “wrapt” here conjuring the sense of both “wrapped” and “rapt” simultaneously, giving “inflections” an appealing physicality. Reading mistake along these lines is particularly Cranian: his letters make it clear that language's ability to elide, change, and intimate (rather than simply mean) excites and propels him into writing poetry. Accordingly, Crane's admirers tend to focus their praise on the very moments of inexplicability that his critics find most inhospitable. By placing “wrapt” and other neologisms in the context of this long-standing debate about Crane's work, the chapter suggests the benefit of reading his creativity as a form of mistake rather than the other way around.","PeriodicalId":163507,"journal":{"name":"The Poet's Mistake","volume":"146 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116525177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fact-Checking Elizabeth Bishop","authors":"E. McAlpine","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.11","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks at historical and factual mistakes in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. Elizabeth Bishop was a writer dedicated to a sense of accuracy; her poem “In the Waiting Room” bears the markers of a specific place and time—“Worcester, Massachusetts” and “the fifth / of February, 1918.” Descriptive specificity is one of her specialties, and this poem, which refers to real stories in that month's National Geographic magazine, gives the impression of combining specificity with objective truth. And yet its facts are muddled: much of the material in the poem actually comes from a different issue of the magazine. Does Bishop's inaccuracy matter given her own adherence to the facts, or is it possible for descriptive poetry to offer its own aesthetic narrative? Focusing on her use and misuse of historical detail in this and other autobiographical poems, the chapter highlights what Bishop's readers have to gain by separating her poetry's fictionalized facts from its literal and empirical truths.","PeriodicalId":163507,"journal":{"name":"The Poet's Mistake","volume":"464 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122500941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emily Dickinson’s Eloquent Lies","authors":"E. McAlpine","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sg53.9","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explains that, like Clare, Emily Dickinson makes her fair share of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other kinds of mistakes, but her style sometimes masquerades as error too. Mostly unpublished during her lifetime, her poems were first made public after her death and under the influence of a strong editorial hand. In their original form on scraps of paper, in letters, and in hand-sewn “fascicles,” they seem to exhibit mistake at every turn. But because they constitute instances of private expression, these improprieties can seem to belong to a set of personal norms not quite subject to the standards of the day. However, Dickinson herself was cognizant of her breaches, often confessing them in letters and sometimes even within the poems themselves. The chapter then determines how Dickinson's own admissions of “wrongness” complicate one's readings of her poetry's mistakes. Does the poet's complicity undo her solecisms, or can awareness coexist with error? The chapter suggests the possibility of reading much of her wrongdoing nevertheless as mistake; the difference between knowing better and doing better may, for Dickinson, be a difference in degree rather than in kind.","PeriodicalId":163507,"journal":{"name":"The Poet's Mistake","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131945979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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