Eavan Boland Quotes

• If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

  Eavan Boland

  Grief, Diminish, Ifs

  Eavan Boland (2008). “Eavan Boland: A Critical Companion : Poetry, Prose, Interviews, Reviews and Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

  55 Copy quote

• Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.

  Eavan Boland

  Shadow, Language, Poetry Is

  Eavan Boland (2012). “A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet”, p.6, Carcanet

  55 Copy quote

• Love will heal What language fails to know

  Eavan Boland

  Language, Failing, Heal

  Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland (1995). “Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland”

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Honor, Together

  Source: www.pbs.org

  30 Copy quote

• Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.

  Eavan Boland

  Men, Mood

  23 Copy quote

• Sleep in a world, your final sleep has woken

  Eavan Boland

  Sleep, Finals, World

  Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland (1995). “Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland”

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Memories, Taken

  Eavan Boland (2008). “Eavan Boland: A Critical Companion : Poetry, Prose, Interviews, Reviews and Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Reality, Desire, Agents

  17 Copy quote

• . . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

  Eavan Boland

  Fog, Giving, Relief

  Eavan Boland (2008). “Domestic Violence”, W. W. Norton

  18 Copy quote

• Flesh is heretic.
  My body is a witch.
  I am burning it.

  Eavan Boland

  Burning, Body, Flesh

  Eavan Boland (2013). “New Selected Poems”, p.32, Carcanet

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: www.pbs.org

  12 Copy quote

• 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, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.pbs.org

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Memorial, United States

  Source: www.pbs.org

  9 Copy quote

• I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.

  Eavan Boland

  Different, American Poetry

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Home, Wonderful, Week

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

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