Author

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.

From Eavan Boland

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.

From Eavan Boland

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.

From 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.

From Eavan Boland

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.

From Eavan Boland

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.

From Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland

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