Rejecting Images of Women as “Metaphors and Invocations, Similes and Muses”: Irish Woman Poet Eavan Boland By Kristin Kallaher ’04 Conboy, Katie. “Revisionist Cartography: The Politics of Place in Boland and Heaney.” Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities. Ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000. # of Women vs. Men in Some Contemporary Anthologies • 5 of 49. Anthony Bradley’s “new and revised” edition of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1988) • 4 of 35. Fallon and Mahon’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990). • Zero. Thomas Kinsella’s The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (19th and 20th century sections) (1989). Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Irish Literature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. • Section on contemporary Irish poetry mentions: • Louis MacNeice, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Richard Murphy, Seamus Heaney . • “There is no point in pretending that this summary would serve as a rudimentary history of modern Irish poetry. Too many poets have been omitted…” • He names ten names, including Eavan Boland, and then says . • “The general pattern, although subject to severe modifications in relation to any one of these [younger] poets, is nevertheless established.” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time by Eavan Boland • “By luck, or by its absence, I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it seemed, live in both. As the author of poems I was an equal partner in Irish poetry. As a woman—about to set out on the life which was the passive object of many of those poems—I had no voice. It had been silenced, ironically enough, by the very powers of language I aspired to and honored. By the elements of form I had worked hard to learn.” “She was Ireland or Hibernia. She was stamped, as a rubbed- away mark, on silver or gold; a compromised regal figure on a throne . Or she was a nineteenth- century image of girlhood, on a frontispiece or in a book of engravings. She was invoked, addressed, remembered, loved, regretted. And, most important, died for. She was a mother or a virgin. Her hair was swept or tied back, like the prow of a ship. Her flesh was wood or ink or marble. And she had no speaking part. If her harvests were spoiled, her mother tongue wiped out, her children killed, then it was for someone else to mark the reality. Her identity was an image. Or was it a fiction?” “Those simplified women, those conventional reflexes and reflexive feminizations of the national experience, those static, passive, ornamental figures do not do credit to a poetic tradition which has been, in other respects, radical and innovative, capable of both latitude and compassion.” .