Poetry Criticism | Boland, Eavan - Anne Stevenson (essay date January-February 1992)

Anne Stevenson (essay date January-February 1992)

SOURCE: Stevenson, Anne. “Inside and Outside History.” P.N. Review 18, no. 3 (January-February 1992): 34-5.

[In the following essay, Stevenson regards Boland's encounter with the Achill woman, chronicled in her verse and her essay “Outside History,” as an important moment in her life and work.]

As will be evident to anyone who has followed Eavan Boland's purgatorial journey into self-placement, the story of her meeting with the Achill woman occurs at least twice in her published work: once in the verse sequence of Outside History (Carcanet, 1990), and again as a prologue to her essay of the same title (P.N.R. 75). Boland, then a student at Trinity College, had borrowed a friend's cottage on Achill Island for a week at Easter, bringing with her, for study, a volume of the Court poets of the Silver Age, ‘those 16th century song-writers like Wyatt and Raleigh, whose...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass