Review: The Poet’s Mistake by Erica McAlpine

Sebastian Faulks, in his 2021 novel Snow Country, writes ‘Europeans at the last frontier would always wonder at their own insignificance, like Cortez when from his mountaintop he first saw not the end of the world… but a boundless new ocean.’ Except Cortez didn’t. Balboa did. This mistake tells us two things: first, Faulks is less of an expert on Spanish colonial history than he ought to be if he’s going to write about it in a historical novel; second, Faulks cuts poets too much slack. Because the mistake is not originally Faulks’s; it originates in John Keats’s poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’. This inherited error also tells us something more important: poets, like the rest of us, mess up sometimes.

Erica McAlpine’s book, The Poet’s Mistake, starts from this premise and from the same mistake by Keats that has now been handed down to Faulks and his legions of readers. She explores why contemporary readers, from the casual to the scholarly, tend to avoid or simply disbelieve the fact that poets make mistakes, and why this is bad when it comes to achieving precise critical understanding of a poem and its writer.

For McAlpine, a good reading of a poem is one that foregrounds the writer’s ‘craft’ above all else, and especially above the reader’s own creative powers of interpretation. She contends that the ‘compulsion to justify’ poets’ mistakes leads to readings that might be brilliantly inventive, but which do a disservice to the elements of writing poetry that poets themselves most value, by giving poets the super-power of being right even when they’re factually or grammatically wrong. In so doing, any approach that tries to explain mistakes away, or claims that no such thing as a mistake can exist in a poem, trivialises the hard work done by poets in constructing their work. After all, why try to do things right when you’re incapable of being wrong?

There is a tightrope to be walked for every critic, and it is one that McAlpine is deeply conscious of. If one can be overly creative in justifying mistakes, one could also be overly creative in finding mistakes. Therefore, McAlpine takes what she deems an empirical approach to error, zooming in only on mistakes of historical fact, grammatical errors, misuses of words, and erroneous allusions to other textual material. McAlpine’s readings of the errors she finds in Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Clare, Dickinson, Crane, Bishop and Heaney show her walking this tightrope with great assurance. In readings of John Clare, Emily Dickinson, and Hart Crane, for example, she deliberately takes on writers whose work is characterised by unconventional lexical, grammatical, orthographical and formal usages.

It is a bold move to tackle an instance of lexical misuse in John Clare, since he was a poet whose work is marked by constant and cultivated carelessnesses of spelling and grammar. Yet in identifying a line at the end of one of Clare’s sonnets in which he seems to muddle the verbs ‘wander’ and ‘wonder’, McAlpine sets out to show that it is both possible and valuable to uncover errors that Clare himself would have wished to correct. She does so by rigorously examining the poet’s usages of the same verbs across his entire group of sonnets, finding that there is only a single instance where he uses ‘wonder’ instead of ‘wander’ when referring to physical motion. The logical conclusion: it’s a mistake. Yet in acknowledging this mistake, it allows us to more deeply understand the significance of these crucial words to Clare’s work.

It is also daring to take on instances of mistake in Robert Browning, since not only is his work notably obscure and lexically inventive, but the dramatic monologue genre that he wrote in makes it extremely murky as to whether mistakes within the text are mistakes of the author or mistakes of the character. Yet McAlpine shows us that Browning’s use of the word ‘twat’ in his verse drama Pippa Passes hinges on him failing to get a raunchy, anti-clerical – and very funny – 17^th Century joke. Indeed, Browning admits in a letter that when reading the word in his source material, he had taken ‘twat’ to be an item of clothing worn by a nun and had used it as such in Pippa Passes. Since it is unlikely that Browning could have intended that his young, working-class Italian girl, Pippa, should have been an avid (mis)reader of 17^th Century English Royalist poetry, it is surely an act of impressive but pointless intellectual contortionism to try and justify this mistake.

Given that McAlpine elaborates on numerous critical justifications for the mistakes that she then goes on to persuasively confirm as errors, The Poet’s Mistake can be read as something of an ars critica. McAlpine displays not only poets’ mistakes, but critics’ mistakes in how they handle poets’ mistakes. And this is powerful for a reader, especially one who is engaged in the practice of criticism themselves, whether as scholar or as teacher. Many of the critical justifications of mistakes that McAlpine elucidates are quite compelling. And McAlpine treats them with respect and admiration. Then she debunks them. But she acknowledges throughout that fallibility is universal, leaving open the possibility that all readings – including her own – are provisional and potentially mistaken. In her chapter on John Clare, McAlpine uses herself as one example of a critic who has indulged in mental gymnastics in order to justify what she now realises was actually a poetic mistake. Moreover, how rare and refreshing it is to read a leading poet and critic, an Oxford professor, write of some lines by Hart Crane that, ‘I cannot pretend to understand fully what this long, beautiful, convoluted sentence means’. What a relief!

If poets can make mistakes, and critics can make mistakes, then so can we. ‘Read and accepted in this light, the poet’s mistake can deliver us momentary relief from our own nagging desire for perfection in the welcome insistence of things as they are.’ In typically modest fashion, McAlpine leaves the implications for her book there, but that statement has extremely wide resonance. In a cultural climate where everyone is constantly engaged in the business of publishing and curating their personal output, the nagging desire for perfection can become deeply harmful and consuming. If we can change the way we impossibly idolise and elevate our poets, perhaps we can also become more tolerant of ourselves. After all, in poetry as in life, mistake is ‘a phenomenon well worth defending – and eventually letting go.’