What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry-and about how we readKeats 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 numerou "McAlpine's point is that accuracy is as important in poetry as in fiction, that intentionality, however difficult that might be to determine, is a factor one must consider, and that unconscious mistakes differ from naïve errors. . . . This study is convincingly argued, delightfully written, fascinating in its examples, and well worth a careful read."