. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan BolandRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A poet's identity is an ongoing journey of growth and change, even after achieving recognition.
Eavan Boland's quote emphasizes that a poet's identity is not a fixed state but rather a continuous process of evolution. Even after a poet has established themselves, their journey of becoming is intertwined with their existence, suggesting that art is a dynamic interplay of experience, growth, and introspection.
Themes
PoetIdentityBecomingArtGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
In a poetry workshop, to inspire participants to embrace their evolving identities as poets.
More from Eavan Boland
All quotes →Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
Eavan BolandRead
When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?
Eavan BolandRead
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 BolandRead
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 BolandRead
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.
Eavan BolandRead
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