Eavan Boland

1944–2020 · Irish poet, essayist & Stanford professor

Eavan Boland (1944–2020) was an Irish poet and essayist, born and died in Dublin. From 1996 she was a tenured professor of English at Stanford University, where she directed the creative writing program. Her prose collection A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2011) ends with “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” the essay this line is taken from.

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“What matters is precisely this, the unspoken at the edge of the spoken”

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