Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was one of the most important Irish poets of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Her influence on a whole generation of women writers was immense, both through her own poetical craft and through her efforts to support and promote her peers. Boland died in April 2020. On that occasion President Michael D Higgins remarked that the contemporary richness of Irish poetry owes much to her “encouragement and generosity to fellow poets”. She was particularly dedicated to helping Irish women to write themselves into the canon of Irish literature – “finding a voice where they found a vision”, as she put it in her poem ‘The Singers’. In the Summer 1987 issue of Studies, Boland reflected on the idea of the nation, her formative years, and a deep meditation on what she describes as poetic ethics and the position of women in Irish poetry.
Eavan Boland, ‘The Woman Poet in a National Tradition’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 76, No. 302 (Summer, 1987), 148-158. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30090853.
The Woman Poet in a National Tradition
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Irish poetry was predominantly male. Here or there you found a small eloquence, like ‘After Aughrim’ by Emily Lawless. Now and again, in discussion, you heard a woman’s name. But the lived vocation, the craft witnessed by a human life, that was missing. And I missed it. Not in the beginning, perhaps. But later, when perceptions of womanhood and Irishness began to redirect my own work, then I greatly missed the voice of a woman in Irish poetry. Apart from any poems she might have written, what I regretted most of all was the absence of an expressed poetic life which would have dignified and revealed mine.
I cut my cloth. Whatever dignity and revelation a woman poet might have offered me I was willing to find, to any extent I could, in the work of Irish male poets. But here I ran into difficulties. I thought of myself as an Irish poet. I wanted to locate myself within the Irish poetic tradition. The dangers and stresses in my own themes gave me an added incentive to discover a context for them. I would have relished the sense of community which came early and easily to male contemporaries. I did not find it. The reasons are not easy to describe. If I say my rapport with Irish poetry faltered because of the simplifications of women in Irish poems that makes it sound more symmetrical and more conscious than it was. At first I felt only a sense of unease. Later, as my own womanhood moved toward the centre of my work, this hardened into a critique. And this is the basis of that critique: the women in Irish male poems tended to be emblematic and passive, granted a purely ornamental status. Not in every case. There were exceptions, distinctions. When male poets wrote about women in a private dimension the images were often warm and convincing. Once the feminine image in their poems became fused with a national concept then both were simplified and reduced.
This happened all too often. Most Irish poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry. Most used women to explore their own ideas about Irishness. The fusion of the national and the feminine, the interpretation of one by the other, was common practice in Irish poetry. Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Dark Rosaleen come quickly to mind. It was also hallowed custom. Both practice and custom reached back, past the songs and simplifications of the 19th century, into the Bardic tradition itself. Daniel Corkery in The Hidden Ireland has written about this, in his own analysis of the Aisling convention. ‘The vision the poet sees’ he writes there ‘is always the spirit of Ireland as a majestic and radiant maiden’.
The more I looked at these images in Irish poetry, the more uneasy I became. I did not recognize these women. These images could never be a starting point for mine. There was no connection between them and my own poems. How could there be? I was a woman. I stood in an immediate and unambiguous relation to human existences which were only metaphors for male poets. As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.
In the meantime, I could only formulate my rejection of these images as they stood. I did not accept such strategies as my truth. I would not consider them as my poetic inheritance.
VI
I had better be specific. I will give two examples to illustrate my points. I have deliberately chosen ambitious and skilful poems. To do otherwise would load the argument and prove nothing. The first poem is by Patrick Kavanagh. It is called ‘Pygmalion’ and it is quoted in its entirety:
PYGMALION
I saw her in a field, a stone-proud woman
Hugging the monster passion’s granite child,
Engirdled by the ditches of Roscommon,
Stone ditches round her waist like serpents coiled.
Her lips were frozen in the signature
of Lust, her hair was set eternally,
No Grecian goddess for her face was poor,
A twisted face, like Hardship’s to me.
And who she was I queried every man
From Balladreen to grassy Boyle
And all replied: a stone Pygmalion
Once lipped to grey terrific smile.
I said: at dawn tomorrow she will be
Clay-sensuous but they only smiled at me.
There is a subject and an object in this poem and they are not what they appear to be. The subject should be the woman in the poem, her suffering and its complexity. Instead it is the poet’s intelligence, his confidence that the power of imagination could have the force of the sexual encounter. Of itself, this can only enrich the poem. Kavanagh’s voice plays over its surface, canvassing his relationship with the land in terms of the eroticism and mysticism he characteristically brought to that relationship. The problem is that the woman, who should have been the subject of the poem, is reduced to being its object; a mere projection. This is not because Kavanagh’s voice and obsession are dominant in the poem. Rather, it is because the image he argues with is not, to echo Eliot, a suitable correlative for the obsession. And there are reasons for this.
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