"Let Me at Least Be Their Witness": Maternal Crisis and Subverting Tradition in Eavan Boland's "Daughter"
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Authors
Lunt, Carrie
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Language
en
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Abstract
In 2024, the editor of Citizen Poet, a posthumous collection of Irish poet Eavan Boland’s essays, chose to include a previously unpublished piece from her private papers. The essay, entitled “Daughter,” presents a more complete picture of the poet’s motivations for her subversive work. Written as a series of fragments that reveal different facets of her influences and struggles, the essay’s unifying thread is the serious illness of her child. As her baby suffered, she felt a growing gap between her lived experiences and an art that seemed to have no room for them. Through the fractured narrative, several themes emerge. Boland’s evolution as a poet centered around her recognition of the absence of the authentic lives of women within Irish poetry. As she changed physical location from the literary city of Dublin to a suburban neighborhood, her awareness of this absence intensified while she was observing and participating in the routines of domesticity. Although she faced criticism from both the feminist movement and literary critics within a male-dominated culture, she incorporated domestic and maternal themes in her poetry. Boland worked to subvert poetic authority through prose essays, teaching, and workshops, and disagreed with the separatist position of some feminist writers. She included in “Daughter” four poems, “Night Feed,” “Endings,” “Love,” and “The Journey,” providing examples of her subversive approach to the both the lyric and dream convention poem. The unfinished essay provides a foundational understanding of Boland’s journey to become one of Ireland’s preeminent poets and illuminates her desire to be a poetic foremother to young women poets.
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Clayton State University