Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life. Eavan Boland More Quotes by Eavan Boland More Quotes From Eavan Boland If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. Eavan Boland diminish grief ifs It has always seemed to me a great honor to be called an Irish poet. I don't think I will ever lose that, but it's also a great honor to be a woman poet. I put those things together. Eavan Boland honor together thinking Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Eavan Boland mood men Love will heal What language fails to know Eavan Boland failing heal language . . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing Eavan Boland fog relief giving Flesh is heretic. Eavan Boland burning body flesh I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening. Eavan Boland agents desire reality I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet. Eavan Boland responsibility long thinking Sleep in a world, your final sleep has woken Eavan Boland finals sleep world To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after. Eavan Boland struggle heart thinking Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization. Eavan Boland taken memories art The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition. Eavan Boland memorial united-states people I'm really fortunate to be at Stanford. I go home every 10 weeks, but Stanford apart from being just a wonderful university is one of the places that are part of a great conversation. Eavan Boland week home wonderful I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry. Eavan Boland american-poetry different There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about. Eavan Boland stop nothing identity together 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. Eavan Boland truth work time past I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language. Eavan Boland understand language history art 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. Eavan Boland effort life world travel Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us. Eavan Boland women remember men past 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 wife poetry mother life
