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Essay on Eavan Boland

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Research Paper on Eavan Boland

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland is perhaps one of Ireland‘s greatest contemporary poets. She is a well educated woman who knew at a very young age that she was destined to find her path in life through literature. Being removed from her homeland at age five to live in London, she found herself next living in New York at the age of fourteen because of her diplomatic father. In the early stages of her teenage years, Boland met the Irish poet Padraic Colum at a party hosted by her parents. She asked him if he had known Patrick Pearse, an infamous Irish revolutionary figure. He responded that he had, giving her the answer she wanted (Battersby).

Boland's work and her life has been shaped by the …show more content…

This began the process which has always set her outside the ruling body of male Irish poets.

Boland says of her feelings surrounding herself and her male counterparts,"I'm not a separatist - I've never believed women poets can walk away from the body of poetry that exists. In the powerful debate which exists in and out of the academy I agree with those who think the real opportunities for women in poetry lie in destabilising the canon, not separating themselves from it. Besides, I have lived in the ambiguity as a woman poet of deeply honouring the work of male poets while at the same time wishing to contest some of the assumptions apparent in that work" (Battersby).

She cannot, however, be called a post-feminist. In a magazine interview with journalist Eileen Battersby, she is quoted as saying,"I don't accept that womanhood is a state we can somehow historically transcend. It is a human condition, not a historic one and as such is a very rich, central part of imagination, not only of social consciousness." Although she is a feminist, she is not a feminist poet. She proves this by saying, "Poetry begins where the certainties end. I would have to say as someone who has benefited from, and is honoured to consider themselves a feminist, that literature must not be bent out of shape to accommodate an ethical position. Freedom is single. Women writers have struggled to be heard in this century and it is very important they are not part of silencing anyone

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