Eavan Boland: poet whose focus on women's experiences redefined the scope of Irish literature

She drew on her country’s literary heritage while moving it in a new direction

Eavan Boland in 1996, the year when she joined the faculty at Stanford University (Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Eavan Boland expanded the voice of Irish poetry by consciously writing from a female point of view, putting the lives and experiences of women at the centre of her poems.

Boland, who has died following a stroke aged 75, published her first poems in her teens and immediately carved out a distinctive creative niche. With chiselled, understated lines, she wrote in a manner that reflected her country’s literary heritage while moving it in a new direction.

She often noted that it wasn’t merely social custom that kept Irish women in a subservient role – the idea was enshrined in the country’s constitution, with a clause stating: “By her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

She never denigrated the achievements of male Irish poets such as WB Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh or Seamus Heaney, but looked for inspiration to the American poets Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, whose works often embodied a politically engaged, female sensibility.

“When I was young,” Boland told The Irish Times in 1998, “there was a hidden struggle over subject matter going on in Irish poetry ... I was aware that it was easier to have a political murder as the subject of an Irish poem than a baby or a washing machine.”

She began to draw on her own experiences, including as the mother of two daughters, to create a new voice in Irish poetry. In Boland’s view, women no longer had to be seen as muses or as the objects of men’s desire, pity or neglect.

In her 1982 collection Night Feed, she drew on paintings of women working in the home for a series of poems, including “The Muse Mother”, in which she wrote of a woman’s desire “to be a sibyl / able to sing the past / in pure syllables / ... able to speak at last / my mother tongue”.

Boland addressed such subjects as motherhood, anorexia, mastectomy and violence. Her clear implication was that these themes were every bit as important as the battles, political strife, manual labour and male gaze towards women that generations of men had written about.

“I knew that the women of the Irish past were defeated,” Boland wrote in a partly autobiographical prose work, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995). “What I objected to was that Irish poetry should defeat them twice.”

Boland sometimes made references to classical myths and poetic traditions, but much of her work was expressed in muted language, often in short lines with simple diction and single-syllable words evoking the everyday experiences of women at the hearth or with a child.

Eavan Aisling Boland was born in 1944 in Dublin. Between the ages of six and 15, she lived in London and New York, where her father was the Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom and then the United Nations. Her mother was a painter.

Boland published her first poems in her teens. She graduated in 1966 from Trinity College Dublin, where one of her classmates was Mary Robinson, who became Ireland’s first female president.

For years, Boland balanced teaching at Trinity College and motherhood, while often writing late at night. “I used to work out of notebooks, and I learned when I had young children that you can always do something,” she told Stanford magazine in 2002. “If you can’t do a poem, you can do a line. And if you can’t do a line, you can do an image – and that pathway that leads you along, in fragments, becomes astonishingly valuable.”

In 1996, Boland joined the faculty at Stanford. In addition to leading the writing programme, she taught popular courses on poetry and Irish literature. She returned frequently to Ireland, where she stayed throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Boland published more than 10 volumes of poetry and two books of nonfiction prose, and edited several other books. She received the Lannan Foundation poetry award in 1994.

One of Boland’s more provocatively titled collections, Against Love Poetry (2001), dedicated to her husband, turned away from the raptures and cliches of young love. Instead, she sought to capture a more mature conception of love, or what she called “the steadfastness between men and women”.

The book contained one of Boland’s starkest poems, “Quarantine”, about an Irish couple setting out on foot in 1847, during the nationwide famine:

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

She is survived by her husband of 50 years, the novelist Kevin Casey, and two daughters.

Eavan Boland, poet, born 24 September 1944, died 27 April 2020

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