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Sobre Eavan Bolan
Sobre Eavan Bolan
Eavan Boland
CRITICAL BACKGROUND
o Eavan Boland (1944-), the most popular and renowned Irish woman
poet, was born in Dublin, daughter of the Irish ambassador in London
and then the United States; her mother was a painter. She moved from
Ireland to England and US at an early age but came back to Ireland in
adolescence where she remained, marrying an Irish novelist. Close to
poetry circles before her marriage, she abandoned the artistic circles to
move to the Dublin suburbs where she became a mother and wife away
from a writing atmosphere. However, it was in this new suburban space
in the late 1960s where she got her poetic voice by living the ordinary life
of a married woman. Female ordinary life gave her the experiential push
to find her own voice, to transmit in poetry what had never been
expressed before in the Irish poetic tradition: she talked about feeding
babies, caring for the house, about abuse, menstruation or mastectomy,
among other things regarding female experience. Her imagination awoke
to a feminist consciousness in order to create a new tradition in the
canon, a female tradition in Irish contemporary poetry by bonding with
the collective imaginary of all the women that lacked voice in the poetry
written by men in her country’s literary history.
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and finding the way an inherited language in the Irish poetic tradition
could open up to new forms to give expression to her experiences, and
waiting for life to find a nook of expression and create her own form in
the poetic language she knew—thus, generating a new poetic language for
women’s experience in the Irish tradition: “the life beckoned to the
language and the language followed” (Boland xii)
o The fact that Boland asserts that “the truth is that I came to know history
as a woman and a poet when I apparently left the site of it. I came to
know my country when I went to live at its margin. I grew to understand
the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile within it” (Boland
xi) means that it was in the margin of culture (as a woman in the
suburbs) that she understood how the canonical Irish literature and Irish
culture had given no chance for women’s voices. She discovered this lack
in tradition and canon, the void or absence, knowing that it was not
herself who lacked any quality in order to become part of the cultural
circle but that it was her who had to build the space or voice that had not
been even considered within the masculinist Irish cultural niche. In a
“heroic tradition” where the poet and writer become savour and hero,
there couldn’t be a female “Stephen Dedalus” because women could not
access wings to escape, but embodied place and experience in “a garden,
a house, with a child in my arms, on summer afternoons, in winter
dusks” (Boland xii). She got the strength to recreate a new space for a
woman’s voice outside the “heroic tradition” from the need to express her
experience in ordinary life and the help of a collective female tradition
from the United States she came to know and read (confessional poets
such as Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich, as well as an American second-
wave feminist ideology). The need to express and the acquired poetic
language found each other in the tempo of her female ordinary life,
joining: “the instinctive but unexpressed life I lived every day and the
expressive poetic manners I had inherited” (Boland xii)
o Where to look at for female poetic models in Irish literary history? What
were the roles of women in Irish literary and poetic tradition? As
Ramazani suggests the great effort and achievement in Boland’s poetry
have been:
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o Her books In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982) break with
the masculine iconography and tradition of Irish poetry and reveals a
new language of feminist consciousness, for the first time in Irish poetry.
Her journey to open up space for women’s voices in the tradition moves
from the expression of ordinary life for women (first book) to the
inclusion of a collective women’s history. The break with an Irish literary
tradition was eased by her affiliation to the tradition of American
experiential or confessional poets, from whom she discovered ways to
express “powerful assertions of female rage and desire, as well as acid
candor (irony), and explorations of specifically female experience of
the body… identifying herself with a collective female experience”
(Ramazani 844). Talking about this influence she asserts in an interview:
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o In subsequent poetry books (From The Journey on, 1987) Boland seems
to focus on the insertion of this collective female experience within Irish
history and literary tradition. She will contemplate the lives of
prostitutes, of women losing their sons and daughters due to exile, on the
death of the body by hunger and sickness due to poverty in Ireland. She
also starts constructing new feminist mythologies, poetic myths and
imaginary landscapes that can hold women’s histories and lives in
Ireland. Following what Alicia Ostriker called a “revisionist mythmaking”
as a feminist strategy, that is, reviewing male myths and the
representation of women within them, and recovering female myths in
order to give them weight and place in the cultural imaginary. For
example, in order to fill the lack of representation of the mother-daughter
relationship in Irish literary poetic tradition, Boland spends great energy
in poeticizing the Greek myth of Ceres and Persephone and join it
with Irish history in its relevance with earth, growing, living underneath,
digging, and going into exile or quest journey. Regarding this lack of
representation she comments in an interview:
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I could answer that the hopes and silences of my first years as a poet
are still fresh to me. But that in itself is not an explanation. I could
tell you that I am a woman in my early fifties, writing this on a close
summer night in Ireland. But what would that mean to you? If I tell
you, however, that my first habitat as a poet is part of your history
as a poet: is that nineteenth century full of the dangerous indecision
about who the poet really is. If I say I saw that century survive into
the small, quarrelsome city where I began as a poet. That I studied
its version of the poet and took its oppressions to heart. If I say my
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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In LION DATABASE search for Author Eavan Boland, then click on “Poets
On Screen” and listen to Boland reading “That the Science of Cartography
is Limited”, you can also find there “The Pomegranate”. In the Author
section read too her BIOGRAPHY.
On the Internet, search and read information about ADRIENNE RICH’s
essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”. This is an
influential essay to understand Rich’s feminist literary critical impact on
Boland, since the strategies of reinvention and revision of tradition are
followed in Boland’s poetry.
Write in your own words why you think Boland considered it was necessary
to reject certain male-centered assumptions that have long
dominated Irish literary culture. What assumptions do you think she
refers to?
Search for the word “mimic” and try to explain what Boland means by “The
Mimic Muse”.
What part of Irish history and group collective, to whom Boland tries to give
voice, lack representation in Irish poetic tradition?
Reflect on this statement: Boland creates poetic space for female Rage,
desire, candour (look up the meaning of this word), and body. What
tradition helps her to succeed in this poetic achievement?