. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the struggle of finding one's own voice and identity in the context of established literary traditions.
Eavan Boland's quote captures the internal conflict experienced by many artists and writers regarding their authenticity and originality. As she navigates the weight of traditional Irish poetry, she conveys a sense of being overshadowed by customs and expectations, likening her struggle to a ghostly presence that inhibits her creative expression. This reflection reveals her quest to find a space where her unique life experiences and language can coalesce, ultimately highlighting the challenge of establishing an individual voice in a deeply rooted cultural landscape.
Themes
AuthorshipIdentityCreativityIrish PoetryStruggle
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about creativity, one might reference this quote to illustrate the challenges artists face.
More from Eavan Boland
All quotes →Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
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.
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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