SOURCE: "Anxiety, Influence, Tradition and Subversion in the Poetry of Eavan Boland," in Colby Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 264-78.

In the following essay, Robertson analyzes Boland's subversion of the male tradition in her poetry.

In his Yeats, Harold Bloom suggests that the greatest influence on a poet is his precursors and that the knowledge of this influence intimidates the ephebe, or fledgling, poet: "The ephebe cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything." Because the precursors "have named everything," the ephebe experiences "a variety of melancholy or an anxiety-principle. It concerns the poet's sense of his precursors, and of his own achievement in relation to theirs. Have they left him room enough, or has their priority cost him his art?" As Bloom developed these theories in Anxiety of Influence, the ephebe poet, in order to create...