Poet's Mistake
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 numerous instances of these errors, from well-known histori...
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 numerous instances of these errors, from well-known histori...
