Voice and Vision in The Poetry of Eavan Boland

Abstract

Boland’s poetry seeks to reconcile political and personal, the moment and duration, self-knowledge –seen as an exteriorisation of the self– and narration. It is therefore fundamentally concerned with aesthetics, especially in visual art, which however it views as a form of division and hypostatization of the moment, while it also seeks to place the intense moment of vision in the processes of time by recurrent images of transformation, anticipation, memory and loss; it is essentially elegiac, celebrating and lamenting the past and reflecting the constant presence of death within the everyday consciousness; hence the model of Vergil, and especially of the sixth book of the Aeneid, and of Irish song.

Keywords

• Eavan Boland
• Self-knowledge
• Art
• Time
• Elegy
• Song
• Vergil