Eavan Boland Quotes

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

I think there is a very strong sense of Irish identity, and I think partly that's to do with the fact that we have evolved differently from Britain and other countries in Europe.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

My parents are Irish, my grandparents are Irish, my great-grandparents are Irish. I was born in England; my blood is Irish.

The arts are very alive in Ireland, so that had its influence on me. But I consider myself European, really.

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.

My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.

My soul is still Irish.

A nation must be embraced, rehabilitated and expressed as a tangible sign of human creativity and as an integral element of mankind's heritage.

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

With the issue of immigration, it's very difficult because, although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears.

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.

My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

England is better only because I stand out there as 'unusual'.

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.