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The Politics of Eavan Bolands Poetry:

Beauty and Violence in the Domestic Sphere
By: Samantha Vath

Eavan Bolands poetry is alternately praised by the mainstream Irish literary

establishment for her control, technical mastery, classicism, and lyric ear, and as frequently
dismissed for her choice of subject matter (Allen-Randolph 1). As Jody Allen-Randolph rightly
claims, the subject matter in Bolands poetry the typically private lives of domestic Irish
women is a regularly misunderstood asset; however, her use of the domestic sphere is neither
trivial nor unimportant, as critics tend to posit. Bolands critics perfectly exemplify what she
subverts in her poetry the desire for Irish poets to revert to the patriarchal tradition in setting,
characterization, and plot. Boland uses her poetry to demonstrate the importance of the identity
and lifestyle of the domestic woman; she flips traditional poetic technique with her use of the
domestic setting and her inclusion of the dichotomy between beauty the sustaining and
enriching qualities of life and violence, whether it be physical or emotional.
Boland enters the stage of Irish poetry in an era of new identity for the genre. The Irish
people had been using their traditions, myths, and heroes to evoke a sense of national identity
during the period in which they were under British rule. And while colonialism is no longer
ailing the country, the patriarchal poetic traditions are still widely used. Boland, as a wife and
mother in Ireland, finds herself missing from poetry. She struggles to find space for herself as a
writer because the instinct is for her to follow the traditional form of poetry which excludes or
mythologizes women or to write sentimental poetry, directed at a female-only audience. But by
opening the poetic canon, Boland is able to write poems about the domestic sphere which break

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through to Irish society in a way they never have. She uses the domestic sphere and the violent
and beautiful qualities within it to reconstruct Irish poetry and the patriarchal tradition. While
contemporary feminist critics praise her for this, seeing a female subject for the first time in Irish
poetry, others do not view her poetry through the feminist lens and because of this, find her
poetry lacking in terms of content. Some members of the literary critical community suggest that
she pigeon-holes women by rarely depicting them outside the domestic sphere, and they also
accuse her of being blind to the fact that her use of the domestic sphere in her poetry is trivial
and uninteresting. These critics entirely misunderstand her poetry and the importance of
showcasing this lifestyle, and in doing so, they make her poetry that much more important.
Boland is a unique artist because of her deep insight into what it means to be a poet in
Ireland and the limitations set on women in that role. As a wife and mother, Bolands poetry
gives her readers a look into the suburban setting, and as an Irish poet, she has a vast knowledge
of the tradition she attempts to reconstruct. Because of the way Irish poetry has been defined, she
primarily found it difficult to insert a female narrative voice or female subject. She says:
I felt increasingly the distance between my own life, my lived experience and
conventional interpretations of both poetry and the poets life. It was not exactly or even
chiefly that the recurrences of my world a childs face, the dial of a washing machine
were absent from the tradition, although they wereIt was that being a woman, I had
entered into a life for which poetry has no namea place where women and poetry
remain far apart. (Object Lessons 18, 24)
In her experience with and analysis of Irish poetry, Boland claims that women in traditional Irish
poetry function only as objects, metaphors, or emblems, and cannot neatly fit in as a narrative
voice, as an actively participating subject, or as the poet herself. However, as Mary OConnor

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states, Boland was not the only woman to struggle with this: In practical terms for the Irish
literary establishment, women found themselves confined to the small and irrelevant occupation
labelled writing for the women's audience, and shut out from the world of Significance (4).
Women were restricted to writing for other women, which was viewed as inherently inferior to
the literature written by men for men. Boland could see this dichotomy between the life of a poet
and that of a middle-class, married woman, and so she struggled to find a way to fulfill both
roles. In the end, she brings the domestic sphere both the beautiful and the violent, the
enriching and the constricting to the forefront through her poetry to actively dissent against the
silencing of women in traditional Irish poetry.
Because of this struggle Boland finds within Irish poetry, she categorizes her poetry as
political. She claims that she is not postfeminist necessarily, but that she uses feminism to inform
her political poetry. Less about equality between men and women and more about the differing
power between certain groups, particularly the differing power between certain spaces, her
poetry explores the seemingly powerless role of women in the domestic sphere, a perspective
which is at once personal and politicalShe combines a rhythmic but restrained style with
personal experiences that suggest universal concerns (Klauke 73). Merging this culturally
private sphere with the very public forum of Irish poetry, her work is inherently political. She
does not believe she can write her political poems, with truth and effect unless the self who
writes that poemis seen to be in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessness with
which the political poem is so concerned (Object Lessons 185). She has identified herself within
this powerless sphere and writes her poetry out of that experience; she takes her femininity and
domesticity, in its perceived weakness and frailty, and makes it her biggest asset.

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This experience as mother, as wife, as woman, is an identification inspired by feminist

literary leaders such as Helene Cixous. As Laura Alexander shares in her essay about Cixous, as
a proponent of the literal writing of the female body Ecriture Feminine she found
motherhood to be the most essential representation of female power: The operations of mother
and pregnancy symbolize the body's reproductive faculty, which Cixous celebrates literally and
as the regenerative force of the mind (4). In order to be a powerful writer like Cixous, Boland
needed to be fully in contact with herself as a woman and become comfortable discussing and
exploring her body as well as her experiences as a woman.
Feminist literary theory really impacts her work because in this theory, writers mostly
women analyze Irish literature within a feminist lens, particularly looking at where women are
marginalized, silenced, or objectified. Hagen and Zelman, in their exploration of Bolands
reclamation of female identity, state, Given the relation between image and selfhood, the poet
especially the woman poet has an ethical obligation to de- and re-construct those constructs
that shape literary tradition, bearing witness to the truths of experience suppressed, simplified,
falsified by the official record (443). Because Boland is aware of the absence of the realities of
Irish women in traditional poetry, she takes it upon herself to supplement the genre through her
own poetry. She uses the domestic sphere to showcase the importance of domestic Irish women;
she uses the nurturing qualities of this space in juxtaposition with the more strangling aspects to
create a more dynamic and realistic assessment of it. This dichotomy, the co-existence of
domestic violence and domestic harmony, both brilliantly showcased, is why Bolands poetry is
so effective.

Bolands Use of the Domestic Sphere

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One of the defining characteristics of Eavan Bolands poetry, as seen in poems like
Night Feed, Hymn, and In His Own Image, is its setting in the domestic sphere and her
ability as a poet to create intriguing verse out of the seemingly mundane tasks of that world. The
content consists of seemingly mundane activities, like washing the dishes or breast-feeding a
child, but she uses them to portray womens bodies and describes them in such a passionate way
that her readers find them to be spectacles. Boland says, Ordinary lifewas assumed to be a
narrow and unpoetic one (Object Lessons 110). But this acknowledgement does not indicate the
end to the discussion of her use of domestic life: McMullen poses the idea that Boland sees that
the ordinary, lived life of the Irish woman was altogether invisible from the Irish literary
tradition (McMullen 66) and that she devotes herself to untying this knot. Boland wants to make
these invisible women visible, she wants the audience to see them, to see the ordinary, domestic
lives of the non-fictional women of Ireland. She says, There is a quality about the minute
changes, the gradations of a hedge, the small growth of a small boy which makes a potent image
out of an ordinary day in a suburb (Object Lessons 173) and her poetry is dedicated to taking
these mundane activities and making them extraordinary.
The allure of Bolands use of the domestic sphere comes from the fact that traditional
Irish poetry succumbs to the pressures of a separate sphere ideology, which restricts the
portrayals of men and women, as well as setting. In 1964, Erik H. Erikson reported on play
patterns of children, observing that female children used blocks to construct interior spaces,
while male children used the same blocks to construct exterior spaces. He concluded that the
differences between their creations correspond to the male and female principles in body
construction, to psychological identity, and to social behavior (qtd. Kerber 1). This perception
became known as the separate sphere ideology; in literature, this is reflected in both the way

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women are restricted as characters and as authors. In poetry and prose, men are the main subjects
of works because most traditional works focus on the events of the public sphere. Women are
used mainly as sexual objects, national emblems, or mythological creatures. Raising children and
cleaning house are not sufficient content for epic Irish poetry; instead, it revolves around public
warfare, nationalism, and politics typically male-dominated, public-sphere principles. This
concept is deconstructed through Bolands poetry; she picks apart the character of woman-asmyth and re-writes her as housewife, mother, menstruating girl, as seen in In His Own Image,
Night Feed, and Menses respectively. Instead of showcasing women to prove a point about
cultural or national identity, as men did, she uses their day-to-day activities to, for the first time,
make women the subject and topic of Irish literature. To achieve this, Boland sets her poems
primarily within the domestic sphere. When she discusses her identification of her Irish setting,
she imagines that The main length of the building ended in a kitchen garden (Object Lessons
164). Her poem Hymn describes the scenery for a rural Irish farm wife:
The cutlery glitter
of that sky
has nothing in it
I want to follow. (5-8)
The narrative voice in this poem, the farmwife, is not tempted to leave this domestic setting,
indicating an enriching quality that must pervade the space. To Boland, the culmination of Irish
activity to her is the home; thus, this is the aspect of Irish life that she wishes to shed light on.
The choice of the domestic setting in her poems is a fairly simple one, but intriguing as an Irish
poet. Irish art paintings, photographs, films, and literature hinges on the beautiful green
scenery of the island. Outdoor settings in the fields, on the cliffs, at the seaside are

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stereotypical of the Irish fine arts. For Boland to huddle her readers inside a cottage kitchen is to
seemingly restrict the readers from Ireland itself. When we read Bolands poems, we stand in a
suburb window (Hymn 12), But in doing so, she is deconstructing the Ireland which ignored
the realities of women. She says, The beautiful place, the lands of wounds and recovery, the
Ireland of historic interpretation, wasa text in which my name had been written merely to
serve and illustrate an object lesson. How could I write it again? (Object Lessons 117). For
Bolands expansion on feminist writing, this retreat into the Irish home is essential. It shows the
lifestyle of women who live within the domestic sphere, and offers that it is not worthless, but
culturally and socially relevant as explained in Domestic Interior:
our effects
shrugged and settled
in the sort of light
jugs and kettles
grow important by. (31-35)
The narrative voice in this poem explains that her domesticity is what gives her life meaning,
that her efforts in raising her children, taking care of her home, are valuable and cannot be
overlooked. For the majority of the women in Ireland, the household is their setting for the day.
Taking care of her house, her husband, and her children were the functions of the everyday Irish
housewife. The abused wife in In His Own Image stands in the kitchen with The celery
feathers, / the bacon flitch (2-3) and the breastfeeding mother in Night Feed says, I tiptoe
in. / To this nursery (8, 19) standing at her baby daughters crib. Boland, through the setting of
her poetry, walks her readers through the seemingly mundane day of an Irish housewife in

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compound with the formal elements of poetry in order to impress upon her readers that these
tasks might not be as ordinary as they seem.
In prior Irish poetry, women were used as the muses of male poets, but Boland sees the
detriment of that both to cultural and individual female identities. Haberstroh says that Boland
makes a vow to "unmask a false image of women, especially the female muse of the male poet"
(qtd. McMullen 70). Boland claims that the male tradition has mythologized women so much
that the real Irish woman has disappeared in favor of the symbolic version. She posits that
overlooking this aspect, the lives of Irish women within the home, does these women an
injustice, that Irish culture is incomplete. When women are removed from the literary tradition,
they are essentially removed from history. She can see this happening on a personal level, being
unable to find Irish poetry about her lifestyle:
I lived in a world familiar to many women. I had a husband, young children and a home.
I did the same things over and over again. At night I watched water sluice the milk bottles
to a bluish gleam before I put them out on the step. By day I went to collect my children
under whitebeam trees and in different weathers. (Object Lessons 183)
So she took matters into her own hands and wrote her story herself. The content matter seems
simple and ordinary; yet, by simply relaying the life she was living, she enters into a
controversial realm in Irish poetry. Irish poets simply dont cover these kinds of topics this
extensively. Bolands goal is to redefine Irish poetry by using the day-to-day activities of women
in a male-dominated poetic tradition, thereby re-inserting the voices of Irish women into their
own history.

Bolands Use of Beauty and Violence

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One of the ways in which Boland emphasizes the problematic nature of the domestic
sphere for women is by depicting the dichotomy between its sustaining and deficient qualities.
Violence dominates Bolands poems, as seen through different features of life like domestic
violence in In His Own Image, eating disorders in Anorexic, motherhood identification
crises in Night Feed, infertility in Famine Road, or breast cancer treatment in Mastectomy.
These are aspects of violence that specifically impact women within the domestic sphere, and
Boland depicts them in a way that showcases the destructive qualities of the situations.
In the poem In His Own Image, Boland uses domestic materials, the metal cookware of
the kitchen, to emphasize the bruises on the narrator, a woman who suffers from domestic
violence. She writes:
my cheek
coppered and shone
in the kettles paunch,
my mouth
blubbed in the tin of the pan. (5-9)
Comparing the domestic objects with this domestic woman shows how this woman identifies
herself. The cold, hard metal is chosen for this poem for its unforgiving nature. But she
juxtaposes this, this admission that she is being abused, with a fierce admiration of her husband
as artist: His are a sculptors handsthey bring / me to myself again (32, 35-6). Boland,
through this characterization of abuser as artist, is not endorsing domestic violence; rather, she
reveals the mindset of a woman who identifies herself as a housewife. As such, this woman
accepts that her identity is in the hands of her husband is the caretaker of her identity, and the
assumption that his actions positively impact her. This view of the husband as creator, as savior

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of her identity, is problematic in many ways, and Boland, through this tortured womans
mentality of her own identity and well-being, juxtaposes violence with love, strength, and
creativity. According to Jody Allen-Randolph in her review of Bolands poetry, through this
poem, Boland traces the connection between female identity and violence (6). She shows that
when women are trapped in a violent domestic sphere, they are unable to provide themselves
with a healthy self-identity and they will accept a distorted version of their female identity
instead. She pits concepts against one another, of love and violence, self-esteem and dependency,
to demonstrate the potential for sustenance within this sphere, but the harsh reality of the
presence of oppression and domestic violence within it.
A similar phenomenon of broken female identity occurs within the woman in Anorexic.
Allen-Randolph again analyzes Bolands poem, stating: Using anorexia both as an illness and as
a metaphor for culture, Boland probes the relationship between anorexia and myths of human
origin which fashion women as virgins or whores (7). In Anorexia, culture dictates to a
woman a culture of extremes: a woman is either a virgin or a whore, ugly or beautiful, thin or
obese. The protagonist of this poem then, because of extreme aesthetic expectations of beauty
placed on the female corporeal identity by society, has developed an eating disorder. In the Irish
patriarchal society, the beauty standards result in impossible expectations on womens bodies
which creates a disconnect between a woman and her body. Accordingly, this woman has entirely
disassociated herself from her own body, instead declaring:
My body is a witch.
I am burning it...
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self-denials. (2-3, 5-6)

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She refers to her body as something in need of punishment, which she deals out in the form of an
eating disorder. She says, Now the bitch is burningShe has learned her lesson (15, 18). This
womans self-identity is very closely tied to both violence and beauty. This womans desperation
to fit the beauty standards of her patriarchal society has resulted in literal self-harm. She has
connected her fulfillment of male aesthetic expectations with her self-esteem, which is ultimately
detrimental. Boland, through this poem, indicates that violence within the domestic sphere need
not be external or physically at the hand of men, but that the patriarchal society and the brutal
nature of the domestic sphere in and of itself results in a distorted female identity.
Another way Boland indicates a distorted female identity is through the relationship
between a mother and child. In the case of Night Feed, Boland shows again the dichotomy
between love and loss or beauty and pain. The poem shares the intimate moment when a mother
breastfeeds her daughter, and explores the way a womans domestic identity changes with
motherhood. At the beginning, the mother tells her daughter, The moment daisies openIts
time we drowned our sorrows (4, 7). She views this time of night, when the world is asleep, as a
bonding time for her and her child, as well as a healing time from the hardships of the day. But
then she admits her fears to her daughter that, This is the best I can be, / Housewife / To this
nursery (17-19). This woman struggles to connect motherhood with her own identity and fears
that this role has consumed the whole of her existence. Once her daughter has finished
breastfeeding, she tells her, And we begin / The long fall from grace (33-4). Breastfeeding is
her favorite part of the day, but once it is over, she does not feel as useful, as beautiful, or as
loved. This can be extended to the womans long-term identity as well. Once her child grows up
and leaves her care, this womans identity will splinter once more, leaving her reeling from the
loss. Boland clearly indicates here that this womans identity is fractured, that her life within the

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domestic sphere is neither clear-cut beautiful nor violent. Her relationship with her child is full of
love, but the resulting singular identity as mother is potentially detrimental to her. As such,
Boland is suggesting that perhaps her life within the domestic sphere is at once nourishing and
insufficient.
To indicate that the domestic sphere can be an extremely powerful force on women,
Boland indicates the result of the failure to accomplish womanly duties. In Famine Road,
Boland explores the devastation of infertility. Commonly, a womans identity, similar to the
woman in Night Feed, is entirely constituted by her children and her role as a mother. When a
woman cannot physically bear children, therefore, her identity, especially if she remains within
the domestic sphere, is severely damaged. In the poem, the female character is: Barren, never to
know the load / of his child in you, what is your body / now if not a famine road? (36-8). If this
woman cannot produce children, then essentially her body is seen as useless. Motherhood is seen
as the epitome of a womans identity in the domestic sphere, and breastfeeding is the symbol for
that action. Breasts, therefore, are a vital part of a womans body. So if a woman is diagnosed
with breast cancer, or she is required to undergo a mastectomy (or double mastectomy), it can be
another crack in her fragile domestic identity. In Bolands poem, Mastectomy, this life-saving
surgery is seen as a robbery to the female protagonist. She, in undergoing this surgery, feels like
she is allowing her doctor to remove her womanhood, her feminine identity:
I flatten
to their looting,
to the sleight
of their plunder.
I am a brute sight. (43-47)

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Having her breasts removed is not seen as a positive thing, the removal of cancerous tissue from
her body so that she can continue living. Instead, she feels robbed of both her physical breasts
and her identity as a woman.
While these are just a few of the poems that Boland has published, and they offer only a
glance into the topics that her poetry emphasizes, this look into specifically violent aspects of
womens lives delivers an unseen look at domestic life. The poetry set in this domestic sphere
indicates that women in these situations have oppressive experiences like this, and it brings
domestic women to the forefront of the historical characters we see in Irish poetry. Bolands
display of domestic life is particularly potent because it shows the dichotomy within that world
the natural, biological beauty of the processes, and the inherent danger and detriment which can
occur, especially when women (whether due to individual inability or external restriction) cannot
reject their situations.

Bolands Impact on her Audience

Some critics claim that Boland is a sensation for Irish poetry in this century, but others
maintain that she could only be such a poet if she didnt deposit herself into the domestic sphere.
Critics overwhelmingly agree that Bolands poetic form is noteworthy. Where critics differ is in
their assessment of her poetrys effect on her audience. She explains this issue when she says:
I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word
poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it
seemed, live in both. As the author of poems I was an equal partner in Irish poetry. As a
woman about to set out on the life which was the passive object of many of those
poems I had no voice. It had been silenced, ironically enough, by the very powers of

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language I aspired to and honored. By the elements of form I had worked hard to learn.
(Object Lessons 114)
She educated herself thoroughly on the style and form of modern Irish poetry, and critics agree
that her handle on poetic technique is sound. But she points out a key issue when she says that
she was not allowed a voice by this same tradition as an Irish poet, she was not supposed to
share her experiences as a female in the domestic sphere. For this reason, her insistence on
maintaining a domestic content is unique to the Irish tradition, opening the canon to an entirely
unexplored space of Irish society.
Some critics, however, do not read her poetrys distinctiveness from Irish tradition as a
successful reconstruction. William Logan, in his 1991 review of Bolands Outside History for the
New York Times, says that, New mythologies are rarely less sentimental than the old, and Ms.
Boland avoids few of the obvious risks. She is expert in the passionless household poem
(Logan). He views her poetic plot as no more than mundane, that all she succeeds in doing is
writing pretty poems about doing the dishes or raising her children. He claims that her depiction
of the Irish domestic sphere isnt any different than what came before, and therefore is not a
successful reconstruction of Irish poetry. He believes that the setting of the domestic sphere
strips her work of any sort of poetic value. Instead, he finds that:
The poems of emigration, of the wear and tear between two cultures, make the dainty
melancholies of her other poems seem crewel work. When Ms. Boland stops being the
bard of fabric (in one stretch of 10 pages we find silk, lace, crepe de Chine, cotton, linen,
damask, gabardine, synthetics, calico and dimity, some of them two or three times), she is
truest to her own culture and most deeply coiled in its falseness. (Logan)

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The only way for Boland to be true to her culture, to deeply enrich herself and her poetry in
Ireland and its people, is to stay out of the house, to stay in the public sphere where there are
supposedly pertinent activities, not swaths of fabric.
This criticism is precisely what Boland subverts with her poetry. Logan does not
explicitly state his wish for male protagonists or more masculine affairs, but the sentiment is
clearly present. He finds emigration more fascinating than Bolands use of cloth as a primary
metaphor. But it is difficult to read Bolands poems and not understand the underpinned violence
there, to not be thrilled by the horror and beauty simultaneously wrapped up in all of the socalled impertinent textiles. Her list of products from the beauty industry, Eye-shadow, swivel
brushes, blushers, Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks, Ice for the pores, a mud mask, (Boland 71) is
within Tirade for a Mimic Muse, a poem which reveals the pretense that keeps supposedly
realist poetry from addressing the truths of Irish women, like prostitution. She also uses silk at
the wristsrice-coloured silks (128) in Mise Eire to reveal the struggles of the long-silenced
prostitutes of Irish history. She uses these inconsequential materials to show that they are not
inconsequential to the women whose entire lives they constitute. These fabrics carry so much
weight in her poetry because, if the reader is astute, they will realize that fabric is never simply
fabric. It is representative of so much more. It could symbolize the unrealistic expectations
women are held to, the ways women are trapped in the domestic sphere, or the pride women
have of their lives in their homes. This use of domestic materials as symbols for female emotions
reveals a more valuable reading of Bolands poetry.
This analysis reveals a deep-seated disparity within the experiences of women in the
domestic sphere. On one hand, this space is the source of so much pride and love, but it can also
serve as the birthplace to violence and oppression. Logan too perceives this and says, When a

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poet is so self-divided, so drawn to the realms she despises, it should not be surprising if her
poetry suffers division too (Logan). But Logan, disinterested from the start due to the
overwhelming presence of feminine symbols pots, cloths, soaps, childrens toys entirely
misses the point of Bolands poetry. Her poetry purposely exhibits this division, to paint a more
representative portrait of the lives of domestic women. The punch that Bolands poetry packs is
due to the underlying presence of violence that is hidden beneath layers of docile domesticity, as
is the case of true domestic violence, hidden within the home. She delivers the domestic sphere
in her poetry within layers of beauty and violence, showcasing her understanding that the
domestic sphere can be a sustaining one, but that it can also be cruel and brutal.
Somehow, spectacularly, William Logan misinterprets Boland in two different ways. He
says that she is too adept at stepping into the male tradition to write about the domestic sphere,
and also that she is too preoccupied with feminine preoccupations to write any poetry that is
interesting or valuable. But hes doubly mistaken. Eavan Boland isnt blind to the flaws of the
domestic sphere, but neither does she condemn it. She doesnt pigeon-hole women into the
domestic sphere, but allows these real women a chance to be subjects of poetry for the first time
in the patriarchal tradition. And just because tradition tells her that domesticity is banal doesnt
mean that she will erase these women and their lives from their written cultural tradition. Instead,
her insistence on perpetuating a domestic content in the face of this conventionalist opposition
makes her poetry not only interesting, but necessary. Without her poetry, the canon would remain
closed for women, leaving them shut out of this tradition as subjects and poets. Boland,
therefore, isnt either the sentimental novelist or the male modernist poet that Logan desires, but
thats what makes her so distinguished in her own right she accomplishes both simultaneously.

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Bolands poetry uses the domestic sphere and showcases the dichotomy between violence
and beauty to reconstruct the Irish poetic tradition in a way that successfully includes women.
Her poetic content revolves around the biological processes of females within the domestic
sphere eating disorders, pregnancy (or infertility), breastfeeding, and physical violence and
the impact they have on female identity. Women who identify themselves within the domestic
sphere run the risk of becoming numb to violence or oppression, as seen in In His Own Image
and Anorexia. Women whose wholly domestic identities are challenged struggle to find
alternate identities within the domestic sphere, as seen in Night Feed, Mastectomy, and The
Famine Road. But these poems do not condemn the domestic sphere entirely; Boland contrasts
these examples of violence by exploring the sustaining qualities of this sphere in poems like
Night Feed, Hymns, and Domestic Interior.
By using this dichotomy the qualities which can enrich or constrict women to explore
the complexity of this sphere, Boland is stepping into the role of a political poet. Her poetry
explores the chasm between the amounts of power given to different groups of people. In
Bolands case, this exploration of the powerless woman in contrast with powerful men, or
perhaps a more powerful domestic sphere, exhibits a new perspective on female identity for Irish
women in poetry. Contrary to what one might assume, Boland choosing to write about her
female experiences in motherhood, suburbia, and domesticity is inherently political.
Womens experiences, in Irish literary tradition, belong in the private sphere, and inserting it in
literature brings it into the public sphere. In rejecting the socially-accepted separate sphere
ideology, she has automatically become an activist.
While critics may frequently reject or dismiss Bolands poetry on the grounds of her use
of domestic content, this domestic content is what has earned her acclaim in the poetic world.

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Her exploration of the domestic sphere is so nuanced, between the positive and negative
possibilities of that space, that the audience is given a dynamic view into the lives of the Irish
people. What makes Bolands poetry interesting to read is this view of ordinary, domestic events
as exciting, worthwhile poetic content. She has been vastly successful in this endeavor too, as
Michael Kenneally explains in his book, Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature: The purest
lyric voice in modern Irish poetry is found in the lucid deliberations of Eavan BolandRooted
in cooking, dressmaking, and laundryBoland accentuates the extreme in the ordinary (9-10).

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Works Cited
Alexander, Laura. Helene Cixous and the Rhetoric of Feminine Desire: Re-Writing the
Medusa. Mode. Cornell University. 2004. Web.
Allen-Randolph, Jody. "Ecriture Feminine and the Authorship of Self in Eavan Boland's In Her
Own Image." Colby Quarterly 27.1 (Mar. 1991): 48-59. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary
Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 113. Detroit: Gale, 1999.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.
Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995. Print.
---. Anorexic. New Collected Poems. 75. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009.
Print.
---. Domestic Interior. New Collected Poems. 91-2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
2009. Print.
---. The Famine Road. New Collected Poems. 42. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
2009. Print.
---. Hymn. New Collected Poems. 95. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009. Print.
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