“The Quarrel with Ourselves:”

Irish Womanhood in the

Poetry of Eavan Boland and
W.B. Yeats

Anna Girgenti
 “We make out of the quarrel with
others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with
ourselves, poetry.”
– W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939)

The Irish Literary Revival

(1891 – 1922)
• The de-Anglicization of Ireland

• Poetry preserves Irish culture

• Women as symbols
THESIS
Eavan Boland both and
W.B. Yeats’ construction of
Irish identity by drawing on the myths
he preserves and then dismantling
them to produce a more dynamic,
fully human image of Irish
womanhood.
Why Yeats?
 The Outsider
“As a white, male, middle-class, Protestant citizen of the
British Empire … Yeats belonged to the dominant
tradition. As a colonized Irishman, however, he was
acutely conscious of repression and exclusion”
(Cullingford, Preface).

 Female Influence on Yeats

“If Yeats had not met Maud Gonne, he would
have invented her” (Howes 7).
Boland Extends Yeats’ Poetry
The Catholic Myth
Yeats: Boland:
“Crazy Jane Talks “Solitary”
with the Bishop”

The Non-Catholic Myth

Yeats: Boland:
“Leda and the Swan” “Daphne with Her
Thighs in Bark”
Boland Subverts Yeats’ Poetry:
Recovering the “Shrill” Voice
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill. (17-20)

Yeats: Boland:
“A Prayer For My Daughter” “Heroic”

“The woman poet in Ireland, in moving from

being the object of the Irish poem to being its
author, has caused real disruption. A poetic
landscape that was once
is now ” (Boland).
An Intertextual Reading of Boland
and Yeats
Political Consciousness
Yeats: Boland:
• “Easter, 1916” • “Heroic”
(1921) (1998)

The Longing to Escape

• “On being asked for a
War Poem” (1915) • “Yeats in Civil War”
• “The Stolen Child” (1997)
(1889) • “The Botanic
• “The Lake Isle of Gardens” (1997)
Innisfree (1890)”
Conclusion
 Outer tension  Inner tension
 Political violence of  Female Irish poet
the Troubles (Boland) (Boland)

 Political violence of  Anglo-Protestant

Easter Rising (Yeats) Irish nationalist
(Yeats)

Boland reconciles both tensions, or

the “quarrel” with herself.
 Works Cited
Boland, Eavan. An Origin like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1997.
Boland, Eavan. “Writing the Political Poem in Ireland.” The Southern Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 1995,
pp. 485–498. Academic OneFile, ezproxy.loras.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/
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Howes, Marjorie Elizabeth. Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
McCallum, Shara. “Eavan Boland's Gift: Sex, History, and Myth.” Poetry for Students, edited by
Anne Marie Hacht, vol. 22, 2005. Gale, Literature Resource Center.
ezproxy.loras.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GLS&sw=w&u=lorascoll&v=2.1&id=GALE
%7CH1420065505&it=r&asid=b91a05eaa10ded5f9f21ce79d179ae92.
Yeats, William Butler, et al. Mythologies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
---. The Poems: A New Edition. Edited by Richard J. Finneran, New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company, 1989.