I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.

I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.

Eavan Boland Quotes