"The Poet's Mistake explores mistakes in poems-and critics' generous responses to them-in order to reveal a crucial tension between thinking about poetry's errors as common failures in craft and honoring them as moments of unintended creativity. It makes the case for calling a mistake a mistake, arguing that when readers deny poets the possibility of error, they undermine the very process of creation that they aim to celebrate. The novel, as a genre, has always been given to mistakes, as John Sutherland and others have ...
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"The Poet's Mistake explores mistakes in poems-and critics' generous responses to them-in order to reveal a crucial tension between thinking about poetry's errors as common failures in craft and honoring them as moments of unintended creativity. It makes the case for calling a mistake a mistake, arguing that when readers deny poets the possibility of error, they undermine the very process of creation that they aim to celebrate. The novel, as a genre, has always been given to mistakes, as John Sutherland and others have shown. But poetry, an art form that accepts accident and surprise as qualities somehow integral to its aesthetic practice, seems inherently immune to the possibility. Most of its flaws appear felicitous. Accordingly, critics of poetry have tended to allow mistakes in poems-solecisms, misused words, factual errors-to inform and sometimes even govern their readings. For instance, Keats's use of "Cortez" when surely he means "Balboa" in "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" is a historical mistake that, despite having produced an array of justifications from critics (of nearly all methodological persuasions), may have more to say about what we believe poetry to be capable of doing than about the poem to which it belongs. Keats's readers feel a responsibility to make right what his poem got wrong. This book begins by asking: why should it be so? By uncovering different kinds of mistakes that poets have made from Romanticism onward, when notions of selfhood become more closely linked with the lyric voice, and, more important, by analyzing their reception, the book by Erica McAlpine raises certain questions about intentionality. For instance, is there a difference between an accident and a mistake? Does the word mistake imply authorial intention? Is it possible for a poet to err without meaning to, either consciously or unconsciously? (Even Freud differentiates mistakes "deriving from repression" from those that "are the result of real ignorance.") In answering these questions using specific examples from poets including William Wordsworth, John Clare, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon, this book identifies certain readings of mistakes as unnecessary justifications and uses the impulse to justify as a way of defining the qualities of poetry that distinguish it from other modes of writing"--
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