. . . 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 βPoetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one personβs 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 young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
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The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.
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I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
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I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.
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There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, βyes,β in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.
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