SOURCE: Weekes, Ann Owens. “‘An Origin like Water’: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Modernist Critiques of Irish Literature.” Bucknell Review 38, no. 1 (1994): 159-76.

In the following essay, Weekes applies Richard Kearney's theory about the connection between Irish Revivalism and modernism to Boland's poetry.

In his excellent study, Transitions (1988), Richard Kearney explores the tensions between Revivalism and modernism in twentieth-century Irish narratives. Revivalism is associated with Yeats's attempt to present a unity of culture by privileging “primordial images of ancient Celtic mythology which predated all subsequent historical divisions into different religious (Catholic/Protestant) or political (Nationalist/Unionist) beliefs.”¹ Modernism, on the other hand, is associated with Joyce and Beckett's denial of “the possibility of sustaining a continuous link between past and present,” and “is essentially a ‘critical’ movement in the philosophical sense of questioning the very notion of origins” (T, 12). Thus the modernist rejects unifying images: “The modes of...