Eavan Boland

Biography

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 and lived in Ireland until she was six years old. At the age of six, she and her family moved to London, where Boland had her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. Dealing with this hostility strengthened Boland's identification with her Irish heritage. She speaks of this time in her poem "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951."

She later returned to Dublin to attend school and self-published a pamphlet of poetry (23 Poems) after her graduation. Boland received her BA from Trinity College, Dublin in 1966. Since that time she has held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, books and journal articles. Boland married in 1969 and has two children. Her experiences as a wife and mother have influenced her to write about the beauty and importance of the common, as she describes in a quote taken from Contemporary Authors. I was there with two small children in a house and I could see what was potent and splendid and powerful happening every day in front of me and I wanted to express that. (Contemporary Authors 1997)

(Biographical information drawn from Contemporary Authors 1997.)

The Works

Through her writing of things common, Boland attempts to give value to experiences which many women share. She believes that the poetic tradition's disregard for these experiences, which are valued by women, leads to a devaluation of women themselves (Reizbaum 473). She writes from the standpoint of someone who is doubly oppressed, by her gender and by her nationality, and yet her work embraces these identities (Reizbaum 475). Reading her poetry requires an understanding of the history of Ireland and its relationship to England. In addition she refers to the primarily male poetic tradition of Ireland and her attempts to make a place for herself within the tradition, so the reader might wish to find information on the poets who created this tradition. Another key to understanding Boland's writing is knowledge of the myths which she incorporates, primarily the myths of Daphne and Ceres. The bibliography below will provide some sources to help the reader gain a basic understanding of Irish history, the Irish poetic tradition, and mythology appearing in Boland.

Works by Eavan Boland

Poetry (from Contemporary Authors 1997)

23 Poems. Dublin: Gallagher, 1962.
In Her Own Image. Dublin: Arlen House, 1980.
Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990. New York: Norton, 1990.
In a Time of Violence. New York: Norton, 1994.
An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems, 1967-1987. New York: Norton, 1996.

 

 

Books

Boland, Eavan. and Michael MacLiammoir. W.B. Yeats and His World. London: Thames, 1971.
Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: Norton, 1995.

 

 

Articles

Boland, Eavan. "Writing the Political Poem in Ireland." The Southern Review. 31.3 (1995) 485-498.
---. "The Woman, the Place, the Poet." The Georgia Review. 44.1-2 (1990) 97-109.

 

 

About Eavan Boland

Brown, Susan. "A Victorian Sappho: Agency, Identity and the Politics of Poetics." English Studies in Canada. 20.2 (1994) 205-225.

"Boland, Eavan (Aisling)." Contemporary Authors. Gale Research. On-Line. 2 November 1997. http://galenet.gale.com. n. pag. (Available only to subscribers.)

Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle. "Eavan Boland." Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1996. 59-90.

Raschke, Debrah. "Eavan Boland's Outside History and In a Time of Violence: Rescuing Women, the Concrete, and Other Things Physical from the Dung Heap." Colby Quarterly. 32.2 (1996) 135-142.

Reizbaum, Marilyn. "An Interview with Eavan Boland." Contemporary Literature. 30.4 (1989) 471-479.

Related Sites

Author: Leslie Crow, Fall 1997 (lcrow@emory.edu)

Links within this site

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(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)