SOURCE: "Eavan Boland's Journey with the Muse," in Learning the Trade: Essays on W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Deborah Fleming, Locust Hill Press, 1993, pp. 179-94.

In the following essay, Mahon analyzes Boland's The Journey and Other Poems, considering what the volume expresses about the poet's development as an artist.

A young Yeats in 1889 urged an aspiring poet to use Irish legend because it "helps originality…. Besides one should love best what is nearest and most interwoven with one's life." Yet thirty years later Yeats himself found A Vision necessary to give him "metaphors for poetry." Similarly Eavan Boland, born in Dublin in 1944, has searched long to find the right voice and subject. From her earliest volume, New Territory, to Outside History, she has published eight collections altogether, three of which incorporate poems from previous volumes. Introducing Eavan Boland reprints all the poems of The War...