“Now I could tell my story”. Eavan Boland’s motifs of revising the Irish poetic tradition

Abstract The prominent place that Eavan Boland occupies in the essentially male-defined and male-dominated canon of contemporary Irish literature is the result of the poet’s pioneering act of entering into a reconstructive and resituating dialogue with that tradition and which in turn has paved the way for numerous younger women poets to claim a place for their voices and redefine that tradition itself. The paper seeks to examine and explore a number of topoi with and through which Eavan Boland would negotiate her position in relation to the Irish literary tradition, from broad general motifs to ones peculiar to the Irish context.