Chapter 20 - Eavan Boland, History and Silence

Summary

The gapped and fractured nature of Irish poetic tradition was from the outset a central theme in the work of Eavan Boland (1944–2020). Its gaps are the products of historical traumas which have often expressed themselves in gendered fashion: while Irish tradition has found abundant use for feminised embodiments of the nation, it has been less comfortable with allowing female experience agency to speak in its own right. Boland’s career engaged vigorously with this historical silencing. I address this dilemma through the prism not just of Irish nationalist historiography but the European Romantic tradition, from Hegel to Wordsworth and Keats. Among the dramas Boland confronts is personal testimony versus positions of exemplarity, in which the poem speaks for and from absences in the historical record. This often places Boland in conflict with the mythic imperatives of Irish poetry, a dissonance registered by the poet in the jagged surfaces of her texts. Situating Boland in the historical moment of recent debates within Irish studies adds an extra dimension to the experience of reading these poems, while also helping us appreciate the way in which their successes have been effectively internalised in subsequent Irish women’s poetry and criticism.