8 Eavan Boland Quotes for You to Enjoy

Eavan Boland

Irish Poet

Born: Sep 24, 1944

Life Past Poet Time Woman Women

Related authors: John Millington Synge Oliver Goldsmith Patrick Kavanagh Seamus Heaney Thomas Moore William Allingham William Butler Yeats

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

Life Myself Woman Mountains Thirties Others Recognizable Married Would Daughters Had House Dublin Been Led Any Fiction Which Suburban Little Use Who Many Found Two

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

Woman Men Before Saw Hundreds Hundreds Of Years Bent Table Over Wrote Years Irish Contradiction After Forms Explored Sealed English Night

The twentieth century had produced a literature in Ireland that kept a tense distance from the sources of faith - and for good reason. Irish writing had suffered a terrible censorship in the twentieth century. Eavan Boland

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

I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life. Eavan Boland

Life Measurement Mother Wife Edge Own Nothing Later About My Own Poetry Student Weigh Had Ideas Know Dublin How Did Wherewithal Suburban Measure Unit Lived Suggested

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future. Eavan Boland

In those years of the Fifties, in London and New York, I lived, without knowing it, in a time when the profoundest changes were happening: when a radical alteration was getting ready to happen in the way a society saw young girls. And, as a consequence, in the way they saw themselves. Eavan Boland

Time Girl Young Radical Society Changes Saw Way Those London New Knowing Alteration Without Ready Were Years York Getting New York Happen Happening Young Girls Themselves Fifties Lived Profoundest Consequence

I was a foggy, erratic teenager: a fifth child, the last in the queue for conversation or attention. Eavan Boland

Conversation Teenager Foggy Attention Erratic Queue Child Fifth Last

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