Eavan Boland: The Mythical Suburban Irish Woman
Eavan Boland: The Mythical Suburban Irish Woman

Summary/Abstract: Eavan Bolands desire has never been to erase Irish history and myth through her poetry but establish a dialogue with them through a mythologizing of the domestic, mother-daughter bond and of the (Irish) suburbs. In her texts, the woman has managed to enter the realm of art as herself. Boland intends to write the female ageing body into poetry. Also, the poet revisits the roles assigned to women, the Mother Ireland motif and the myth of the cyclical renewal of the Greco-Roman earth goddess and mother Ceres or Demeter and of her daughter Persephone. Since nature and landscape have been traditionally personified as feminine in Irish literature, Boland had to come with responses to this feminine tradition through what she considered a poetry of the suburbs.

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