Compare and Contrast Eavan Boland's use of narrative voice
             with the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
             Eavan's Boland's poetry, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Aurora Leigh', deals directly with the tensions between traditional definitions of woman and man, and the apparent dichotomy between the terms 'woman' and 'poet' which Boland says are seen as being like 'oil and water and can not be mixed.' 1
             Boland's objectives are visible in her choice to claim her identity and vocation as a poet and her intention to rewrite poetic history according to her own truths. Boland is fighting against the deep-rooted prejudices directed at female Irish poets, which stem from the very beginnings of Irish poetry. As Ni Dhomhnaill said, 'woman is not poet, but poetry. A woman can only be accepted in the literary tradition as a Muse.' 2 This type of idea set up a hierarchy between the male bard and his female muse, in other words the male was allowed an active voice whilst the female figure had to remain passive in the background. Boland's poetic identity, on the other hand, is strongly female and her project is to recover the female poetic heritage. However, she does not simply seek to ignore her predecessors, the quantity of allusions to other poets reflects her determination to engage with the poetic tradition and insert herself into it.
             Unlike Boland, Barrett Browning really was building up a female poetic heritage practically from scratch. Previously the speakers of Victorian poetry had been male, and often used their narrative voice to suppress the female point of view and promote patriarchal views. In Victorian times, men and women were seen to be living in seperate spheres, meaning that men had a set of behaviours, attitudes and vocations that they could have and women had an entirely different set of things they could do. Being a poet was not an acceptable vocation for a woman, in fact writing poetry was seen as
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