Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland: Marginal Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter uses the examples of Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland to show that classical rewritings gradually became ‘fashionable’ in Irish poetry in the late twentieth century. Unlike Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, neither Mahon nor Boland can be considered as ‘classical poets’. Both however, and despite producing very different bodies of work, have re-appropriated classical material over the course of their career to articulate their sense of marginality vis-à-vis contemporary Irish poetry. Mahon’s re-appropriations of Greek and Latin literatures, the chapter argues, notably enrich a wider reflection on home and belonging: from exile in the early 1980s, to imaginative homecoming in recent Homeric poems. As for Boland, her classical work illustrates the evolution of her reflections on gender and on the place of women in literary canons, both as authors and as artistic subjects.