Exploring the Use of Mythology in Eavan Boland’s Poetry

Abstract

This study attempts to analyze ten poems by Eavan Boland and focuses on the way that Eavan Boland used in revising mythology in her poetry to provide honest accounts of Irish women's issues and experiences. This study deals with the problem of marginalizing Irish women in patriarchal literature and using them only as emblematic images and discusses how Boland integrates mythology with her autobiographies in her poems to highlight major areas in which Irish women's lives have traditionally been suppressed by patriarchal values. In completing this thesis, the descriptive qualitative method is used. This method is applied by describing the data and analyzing them, related to the focus of analysis. The materials of this study are collected from several sources such as libraries, book stores, and the internet. Then describing and analyzing the data collected. The analysis focuses on the use of mythology in contemporary poetry as portrayed in some of Eavan Boland's poems. The findings that emerged in this study showed that Eavan Boland has a specific and different view of Irish mythological history than that used by other Irish writers by using variant and modified mythological stories than those used by famous Irish writers to develop and add profundity to her poetry. Similarly, Boland has succeeded in integrating myths with her autobiographies to write auto-mythological poems. Based on the findings, further studies are suggested on Eavan Boland's auto-mythological poems since there is a lack of the studies on auto-mythological poems in general and Boland's auto-mythological poems in specific and since there is a scarcity of works on Eavan Boland, more research on Boland's works is suggested especially those themes that have considered issues such as violence in society, Great famine, politics and the experience of being a woman and poet in the suburbs, the researcher also recommended that researchers should have enough historical background if they want to start a study or research on the Irish mythological history as it is too diverse and multi-legged.