Research Paper on Eavan Boland
Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland is perhaps one of Ireland‘s greatest contemporary poets. She is a well educated woman who knew at a very young age that she was destined to find her path in life through literature. Being removed from her homeland at age five to live in London, she found herself next living in New York at the age of fourteen because of her diplomatic father. In the early stages of her teenage years, Boland met the Irish poet Padraic Colum at a party hosted by her parents. She asked him if he had known Patrick Pearse, an infamous Irish revolutionary figure. He responded that he had, giving her the answer she wanted (Battersby).
Boland's work and her life has been shaped by the need to establish and question identities and relations, a difficult struggle for both Ireland and its people. The role of the poet within Ireland’s history is crucial to her, but so is defining a woman's place in society. She has fought for recognition in the poetic world and has waged a hard battle in trying to have women recognized as poets instead of just the subject of poetry. The battle is very personal, considering she is one of only three female poets among thirty-four Irish male poets. She says,“There seems to be no difficulty in being perceived as a woman poet. The trouble appears to lie in being fully accepted as an Irish poet“ (Battersby).
Boland’s career started early; her first poem was published when she was seventeen, and her first collection, New Territory, came out when she was only twenty-two. In college at Trinity, she perfected her style and became a very enthusiastic part of an emerging poetic movement. By her mid twenties, however, she had left her fiery poetic path. ...
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These are excerps from the personal diary of Rosamond Jacob, who was an Irish born writer and activist. Her diary contains her first person accounts of events in Ireland both before and after the Irish War of independence, as well as many of the events she heard about. She was an active member of the pro-independence Sinn Fein party in Ireland. Her diary provides unique insight from a women who not only experienced the War of Independence firsthand, but was also an accomplished writer.
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Although there is a common assumption that the majority of Romantic poets are men, women too were writing poetry between 1780 and 1830 and their poems were published, purchased and read just as much as that of their male counterparts. Charlotte Smith was one of these poets and she was held in high regard among her peers and was considered one of the most successful writers of her time (Brooks, 1). Although successful as a writer Smith’s personal life was difficult, her mother died whilst in childbirth and she was raised by her aunt. She married at fifteen and mothered twelve children, of which only nine outlived her, with her husband Benjamin Smith who was later imprisoned for debt. Smith joined her husband in prison and it was there that she began to writing in an effort to pay her husband’s debt. After successfully publishing novels and poetry including her first collection Elegiac Sonnets and other Essays (Ferguson et al, 2127), Smith died a desolate women in 1806 after suffering in her later years with uterine cancer (Curran, 67).
Marianne Moore’s most popular poem, which is also her most ambiguously titled poem, is called “Poetry.” In this poem Moore decisively strayed away from her conventional writing style of contrariety and the bizarre, but it does seem to share other characteristics of her earlier poetry. Moore’s apparent purpose in writing “Poetry” was to criticize the present social outlook on the entire idea of poetry, to come up with a universal definition of poetry and of genuine poetry, and ultimately to convince those who dislike poetry of its benefits. She attempted to present this criticism and definition by means of blatant irony, and even though she desperately wants to describe the seemingly trivial activity of poetry, she fails to provide a definition that is not caught up in the negative.
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Marianne Moore ranked with Emily Dickinson among America’s finest woman poets. Moore crafted her poems superbly. She generally used poetic forms in which the controlling element is the number and arrangement of syllables rather than c...
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