. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan BolandRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the close relationship between vision and imagination in Ireland, particularly in the context of poetry.
Eavan Boland's quote highlights her experience as an Irish poet, suggesting that the cultural environment in Ireland allows for a more harmonious relationship between what one envisions and what one imagines. In some countries, this gap might be wider, indicating that the Irish landscape and its literary tradition facilitate a unique creative process where vision and imagination work together seamlessly.
Themes
IrishPoetryImaginationVisionCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the influence of culture on artistic expression.
More from Eavan Boland
All quotes →Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
Eavan BolandRead
When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?
Eavan BolandRead
There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.
Eavan BolandRead
If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.
Eavan BolandRead
Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.
Eavan BolandRead
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A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
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I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.
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