Eavan Boland Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Albert Gelpi

Critical Essay by Albert Gelpi

SOURCE: Gelpi, Albert. “‘Hazard and Death’: The Poetry of Eavan Boland.” Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4 (December 1999): 210-28.

In the following essay, Gelpi investigates the influence of the American poet Adrienne Rich on Boland's poetry.

Eavan Boland's growing international reputation is grounded in the recognition that she is the first great woman poet in the history of Irish poetry. Her success is yet another validation of William Carlos Williams' observation that the local is the universal. That very American conviction, which runs from Thoreau through Whitman and Dickinson to Frost and Robinson Jeffers on to Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and Denise Levertov, is perhaps one reason why Boland, despite or perhaps because of the Irishness of her work, has found a reciprocated affinity with American poets. She has acknowledged the particular example of women poets, especially poets of the immediately previous generation like Bishop and Levertov, Sylvia Plath...
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