“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.”
— Eavan Boland
“Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.”
— Eavan Boland
“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.”
— Eavan Boland
“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 in a series of riffs on independence and identity.”
— Eavan Boland
“. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing”
— Eavan Boland