Irish Literature

UNIT 3—TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY

Eavan Boland
CRITICAL BACKGROUND

➢ INTRODUCTION TO AUTHOR AND CONTEXT

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.

o As she states in the introduction to her Collected Poems, her training as a

poet was within masculine circles of male poets: “I began in a city and a
poetic world where the choices and assumptions were near enough to
those of the nineteenth century poet. The formal poem was respected.
Most importantly, the poet’s life… was exalted” (xi). Boland goes on
expressing the anxiety and confusion she felt knowing how irreconcilable
the life as a poet and the life as a woman, based on the traditional
standards she was transmitted by these poetic circles and larger culture,
would be: “I had no clear sense of how my womanhood could connect
with my life as a poet” (idem.). “When I was young in Ireland” Boland
comments “I felt there was almost a magnetic distance between the word
woman and the word poet” (In Gilbert and Gubar, 1288).

o The answer to this conflict, dilemma or what is known as the “double

bind” of the women poet was in her suburban house, having her own life

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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:

To embrace Irish identity while rejecting certain male-centered

assumptions that have long dominated Irish literary
culture. For Boland, as a young woman writer, the frozen,
mythical images of the Irish nation as an idealized woman—Mother
Ireland, Dark Rosaleen, Cathleen Ni Houlihan—were inhibiting and
insufficient. While her early verses reflect W.B. Yeats’ s strong

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influence, Boland came to decry the inadequacy of what she called

“the Mimic Muse” of Irish tradition, charging that it falsified
women’s lives and prettified bloodshed in service of the nation. Such
poetry was insensitive to the “human truths of survival and
humiliation” (quoted from Eavan Boland’s A Kind of Scar: The
Woman Poet in a National Tradition, 1989)…. Irish poetry had to
break with rhetorical cosmetics and masculinist iconography
if it was to recover Irish women’s historical experiences, including
domestic labor, motherhood, famine, mortal fever, prostitution and
emigration. (In Ramazani 844)

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:

From an Interview with Eavan Boland in www.poets.org

Schmidt: In Object Lessons, you mention reading Sylvia Plath at

an early age, and later Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. Is it
possible to say something more about how each poet’s work has
influenced your own, and if their work shares qualities you see as
either especially “American” or “feminine”?

Boland: It’s an interesting question. Each of those poets has been

very important to me. Each of them leads me back into the
American poetry they were nourished by, and departed from, and
returned to in certain ways. I can see Whitman better through
Adrienne Rich at times, than I can through some of his own poetry. I
wish a more exact and exacting critique had been made for Sylvia
Plath. I think she was an American surrealist and is too often
discussed as a character in an American melodrama. Bishop
interests me so much because she opened this fascinating space
between voice and tone; her tone was so talky and throwaway in
her poems. Her voice was so dark, so achieved. The poem you hear
happens in the space between those two. Did she do that because she

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was American, feminine, a formalist who destabilized forms by

using them in new contexts? All of the above, I’m sure. So it’s hard to
make the lines and draw the boundaries. They’re also precious to
me, I won’t deny it, because they opened the identity of the
poet up for me. They made that identity include their
womanhood, and they found ways to explore and
articulate their womanhood through that identity. One of
the reasons I feel so confirmed by some of what has happened in
American poetry is because of them. I found the courage to be a
poet in Ireland and it was a given that I was an Irish
woman. But they gave me the courage to believe that one
identity need not limit or edit the other.

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:

From an Interview with Eavan Boland in Carcanet Press website

Poems about mothers and daughters do not tend to loom

large in literary canons. Is it difficult to find a mode and
language with which to broach these connections?

I come at that slightly differently. Mothers and daughters loom

large in reality. If they don't loom large in a literary
canon, that's a loss, an absence. It's important to be
clear about what that absence means. Above all, it
doesn't mean that the subject isn't important. What it
means is almost the reverse: when a literary tradition fails to
include something central and humane, the response should be

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that an absence like that has no authority. All it means is there

is some flaw of inclusion. So I didn't find it hard to find a
mode or a language. I would have found it hard not to. It felt
natural to look for the place where something I lived and
understood could be included in poetry. The point of entry, of
course, was in my imagination, not in the canon. And I
didn't feel that my imagination was bound by anything that was
missing from the poetic past.

o Throughout her poetic development, Boland has moved from the

expression of her own private life, a woman’s private life through a
poetic language that has to be found and created, to the perception of
the necessity of building up connections for a literary tradition where
women’s voices are included, or even a women’s literary tradition per
se, that is, moving from the persona towards a historical collectivity of
women, sharing female experiences. So, in this sense, she started her
journey from her present as a woman, into the revision of women’s
pasts, towards, as she states in her “Letter to a Young Woman Poet” a
possible continuity in the future of a growing female literary tradition
where bonds, affiliations and identifications with other women
writers are essential.

From “Letter for a Young Woman Poet” in A Journey with

Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2011)

I wish I knew you. I wish I could stand for a moment in that

corridor of craft and doubt where you will spend so much of your
time. But I don't and I can't. And given the fact, in poetic terms, that
you are the future and I am the past, I never will. Then why write
this? It is not, after all, a real letter. It doesn't have an address. I
can't put a name at the top of it. So what reason can I have for
writing in a form without a basis to a person without a name?

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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present is your past, that my past is already fixed as part of your

tradition….

Occasionally I see myself, or the ghost of myself, in the places where

I first became a poet. On the pavement just around Stephen’s Green
for instance, with its wet trees and sharp railings. What I see is not
an actual figure, but a sort of remembered loneliness. The poets I
knew were not women: the women I knew were not poets. The
conversations I had, or wanted to have, were never complete.

Sometimes I think of how time might become magical: How I might

get out of the car even now and cross the road and stop that young
woman and surprise her with the complete conversation she hardly
knew she missed. How I might stand there with her in the dusk, the
way neighbours stand on their front steps before they go into their
respective houses for the night: half-talking and half-leaving.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

o Boland, Eavan. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995.

o Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of

Literature by Women. London and New York: WW Norton &
Company, 2007.

o Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English

Literature. Vol. 2. London and New York: WW Norton & Company,
2006.

o Ramazani, Jahan et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and

Contemporary Poetry Vol. 2. London and New York: WW Norton &
Company, 2003.

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➢ SELF-STUDY ACTIVITIES and RESEARCH

 Listen to Eavan Boland reading The Pomegranate (minute 18 ) and talking

about her life as a woman poet in Ireland in the Lunch Poems event at UC
Berkeley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFvVlhKa8O8

 Read the article “Daughters in Poetry” by Eavan Boland on the following

webpage:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/daughters-poetry

 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.

 In the Internet, search for the term “Feminist Revisionist Mythmaking”,

read and relate to Boland’s approach to female imagery in her poetry.

 Search and read Ceres and Persephone’s myth.

 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?