Irish contemporary poet Eavan Boland mounts the starting point of her poetry to a very practical issue of how to imagine women’s lives inside Irish history. Given E. H. Carr’s modern notion of the ‘historiography’ of history, history that used to record the progress in the public sphere can be regarded as masculine. And in such masculine history women, who have often been associated with Nature due to their biological function, have never been imagined as active contributors to historical progress. Likewise, Irish women’s domestic experiences have been discarded as worthless while Irish men’s public experiences have been integrated to the progress of Irish history. Troubled by the fact that Irish women's lived experiences have been silenced in Irish history, Boland has been exploring the possibility of eroticizing such masculine history and creating a livable space for real-life Irish women in her poetry. Therefore in this essay I'll look into Outside History (1990) among her many books of poems published since 1962. Outside History, which comprises of three parts, is especially significant in her poetic career because in it Boland’s individual and communal concerns as a woman and woman poet are intricately woven and expanded to the issue of the historiography of Irish history. Specifically, I will examine how Boland engages in a very creative project of diving into Irish history and emerging with a body of lived experiences of women that have been silenced and treated as non-existence. I will also illuminate the fact that Boland’s erotics of history suggests a new alternative way of writing political poetry in Ireland. Ultimately, I aim to show that Boland, not by romanticizing past women in a new myth and legend but by etching out an original poetic space, has successively swerved from the formidable influence of W. B. Yeats and become a representative poet of her own.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."