Eavan Boland

Poet

1944-09-24

Quotes by Eavan Boland

• . . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

  Read quote

• . . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

  Read quote

• 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. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

  Read quote

• Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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 - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.

  Read quote

• It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.

  Read quote

• There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

  Read quote

• I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

  Read quote

• If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

  Read quote