The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
It has always seemed to me a great honor to be called an Irish poet. I don't think I will ever lose that, but… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
In those years of the Fifties, in London and New York, I lived, without knowing it, in a time when the profoundest changes were… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time.… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
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… — Eavan Boland Copy Share Image
