Through the Mythographer' s Eye

This book is an invitation to study myth and legend in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. The poems are read through the eyes of such mythographers as J. G. Frazer, C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, René Girard or Roland Barthes. Three themes, to which both Heaney and Boland relate, are presented: the myth of the goddess of the land, the journey to the underworld and the trope of the muse. However, while these myths have proved stimulating for many male poets, they can also be "a very real dragon that every Irish woman poet has to fight every time she opens her literary door," since they tend to misrepresent women. Thus this first book-length study on Heaney's and Boland's use of Irish, classical and biblical myths discusses two major Irish poets who share a literary inheritance but approach it from different angles.