Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us. Eavan Boland Read Quote
There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs. Eavan Boland Read Quote
I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort – the intense self-conscious effort – to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange. Eavan Boland Read Quote
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries. Eavan Boland Read Quote
As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist. Eavan Boland Read Quote
I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction. Eavan Boland Read Quote
I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language. Eavan Boland Read Quote
One of the things women poets have been engaged in – among the other things they’ve been doing – is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem. Eavan Boland Read Quote
During my twenties and thirties, my interest in the political poem increased as my apparent access to it declined. I sensed resistances around me. I was married; I lived in a suburb; I had small children. Eavan Boland Read Quote
In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not. Eavan Boland Read Quote
