Most young poets start out with a reverence for a past defined for them by someone else. Here are the great poems, they are told; these are the exemplars to learn from….in those years I thought of myself as merely concerned with writing poems. I applied myself to the craft of a stanza, or to learning a more agile syntax. But the self-limitation failed. I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language. They seek out their own progenitors.
—Eavan Boland, title essay of A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (WW Norton, 2011)
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