The importance of a specifically Irish identity is central both to the critical trajectory Eavan Boland has traced for herself as a poet and to the way in which her work has been received and read. Boland's earliest investigations of the process of identity formation are shaped by her awareness of the concept of nation as foundational to her sense of self. An important facet of these explorations is Boland's perception of the exclusion of Irish women from the political and the cultural history of their nation. Her work registers the desire to draw attention to this act of exclusion and to the sense of loss it has created for later generations of women. Estranged from the national narrative of the past, women create alternative ways of articulating their relationship to history, both individually and collectively. Implicated in this project is Boland's presentation of her own experience as an Irish woman, and more specifically as an Irish woman writer. In her writing the relationship between creativity and literary tradition assumes an enduring importance.

The concept of memory has been crucial to Boland's developing political thought for many years; it is with reference to memory that the interwoven states of private and public in her work must be problematized. This dynamic highlights the importance of gender to larger debates on memory, as Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith have indicated: ‘What a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender.’ As well as providing inspiration for Boland's work, the process of memory is reflected upon directly: as Catherine Kilcoyne has suggested, her oeuvre constitutes ‘a critique of memory as poetic, linguistic device’. As this chapter will argue, Boland first privileges the personal significance of memory before placing remembrance and memorialization at the centre of a larger debate on the limits of a national tradition. This progression is not a naturally evolving one, however, but rather a strategic reinforcement of the validity of lived experience as a foundation for cultural authority; it is Boland's early estrangement that legitimizes her continued identification with a marginalized position in spite of her creative and critical reputation.