"We Were Never on the Scene of the Crime": Eavan Boland's Repossession of History

Abstract

From Yeats and the Celtic Revival onward, Irish poets have recorded, shaped, and criticized their nation's emerging independent identity. In the process, of course, they also attempted to reforge links to the past by creating for Ireland a literary incorporating the myths, folklore, and symbols of a long-suppressed Gaelic heritage. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the literary wished into existence by Yeats has been expanded, modified, complicated, and virtually completed: it has become, so the argument goes, a given in Irish literature, a dead issue. Thus in Modern Irish Poetry, Robert Garratt assumes a change among a younger generation of writers in their attitude toward tradition (5). For today's poets, Garratt argues, the need to create and establish a in literature no longer appears foremost in their thoughts (5); contemporary poets no longer feel compelled to write the definitions and apologetics that so obsessed their poetic forefathers. Although Garratt does not use the word, forefathers is by implication a key concept in his formulation; the Garratt traces (from Yeats to Heaney) is exclusively male. For women, who until recently have appeared only as subjects and objects of poems, not as their authors, the matter of carries considerably more urgency than it does for their male counterparts. Indeed, just as the early Revivalists