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PB April-May 2025
April-May 2025 57
The course
of Empire
Eavan Boland’s
ousts George
Berkeley’s name
from TCD’s
main Library but
others too need
to move on
By Kevin Kiely
T
rinity College Dublin (TCD) marked
changing the name of its main
library on 10 March in a ceremony
presided over by the inevitable
Mary McAleese, Chancellor. The
revision, promoted by the Students Union,
following a petition, marked a seismic
academic cultural caesura.
The Berkeley, has been renamed the
Eavan Boland, Library though apparently
only 59 out of the 855 submissions, in a
‘consultative’ process had voted for Boland.
A recent letter in the Irish Times from the
editor of History Ireland points out that
Wolfe Tone got 264.
A paper by Catriona Crowe for the Trinity
Legacies Review Working Group founded by
Provost Linda Doyle, had noted that
Boland’s “great achievement was to move
women from the object (muse, dream,
symbol) of poetry to the subject who was
writing the poem”.
Her name, she wrote, “would bring a
magnificent poetic, scholarly and feminist
reputation to a building dedicated to the
humanities”. On the occasion of the
renaming, College Archivist Helen Shenton
said the library would now be “bolstered by
Eavan Boland’s scholarly and feminist
reputation”.
Boland (1944-2020) won out over other
nominees, including Francis Sheehy
Skengton, pacifist; Paul Koralek, brutalist
1960s architect of the library; Oscar Wilde
and, of course, Wolfe Tone.
George Berkeley (1665-1753), Ireland’s
best regarded philosopher since John
Scottus in the ninth century, has
accumulated a vast reputation as doyen of
immateralism or subjective idealism, which
claimed that material objects only exist as
perceptions in the mind (“esse est percipi”
– “to be is to be perceived”) and his
quandary as to whether a tree that fell
without anyone hearing it really fell.
He published ‘A Treatise Concerning the
Principles of Human Knowledge’ (1710) and
‘Three Dialogues Between Hylas and
Philonous’ (1713), critiquing materialism
and Locke’s theory of abstraction.
In California, Berkeley, both the city and
its hotbed university, were named after him
in the 1860s. Berkeley’s poem ‘Verses on
the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning
in America’ (1726) includes the famous line:
“Westward the course of empire takes its
way”, aligning with the aspirations of the
CULTURE
58 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 59
woman as national muse”. To her “it was the
violation, even more than simplification,
which alienated me…Women, as it happens,
are not especially visible in Ireland”. Her
‘Night Feed’ sequence in ‘Mise Éire’ is pure
Plath-parody. The issue of kitchen
confinement has been well rehearsed by
male predecessors such as J. M. Synge in
‘The Shadow of the Glen’ and Bernard Shaw
in his radical feminist plays such as ‘Major
Barbara’, ‘Candida’, and ‘Saint Joan’.
Boland explicitly addressed issues of
female identity, power, and representation
and while her feminism is nuanced and
often intertwined with her exploration of
Irish history and identity, her commitment
to challenging patriarchal structures and
amplifying women’s experiences is well
recognised.
One of the problems with ‘Object Lessons’
is that Eavan Boland’s distance from, if not
rejection of, eroticism in her poems seems
like repression: “I am well aware that words
such as sexual and erotic have—in the world
outside the poem—daunting engagements
with the social, the psychological, the
sociological. These are not my concern and
are, in any case, well outside my
competence”.
In ‘Degas’s Laundresses’, Boland’s
isolated female, finding ‘death’ in solitary
domestic circumstances, evokes the Realist
painter’s series of sociological impressions
of women working in laundries:
“You rise, you dawn/roll-sleeved
Aphrodites,
out of a camisole brine,/a linen pit of
stitches,
silking the fitted sheets
[ending rather obviously] it’s your winding
sheet”.
The style here is anecdotal and
imprisoned in punch-line poetics which are
often easily anticipated.
This is in contrast to the established
modern norms for American poets such as
Plath, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton.
Boland cannot manufacture the depths of
Sharon Olds’ poetic eroticism, Rita Dove’s
classicism or Nikki Giovanni’s radical post-
feminism. Inevitably, she admires Carol Ann
Duy’s ‘Warming Her Pearls’ for its shift
away from woman as object to a ‘poetry’
and Boland inevitably celebrates Duy’s
embrace of instant accessibility.
“I did begin to resist the apparent
splitting of poet from woman, thinker from
woman and to write what I feared was
political poetry”, she wrote. “I have never
felt I owned Irish history; I have never felt
entitled to the Irish experience”. This is
posturing, even reverse snobbery. Besides
the Stanford years, she spent much of her
city’s pioneering founders. Just like them,
he was more than ready to manifest destiny.
Until recently he was a hero for progressives:
a 1984 essay in the Crane Bag, by Richard
Kearney, named Berkeley first among a
group of radical Protestants who had
“bequeathed a liberating heritage”.
Otherwise, he was a small-scale slave
owner in Rhode Island and in keeping with
the spirit of our times (at least until the turn
in the US), it is this fact, and the fact he
referred to Native Americans as “inhumane
and barbarous” that precipitated the
de-naming.
When she was six, Eavan Boland’s family
moved to London after her father was
appointed Irish ambassador to the UK. At 14,
she returned to Dublin to attend Holy Child
School in Killiney. She published a pamphlet
of 23 Poems in her precocious first year at
Trinity and graduated with first-class
honours. After lecturing in Trinity, in 1996
she became a tenured professor at Stanford,
living between Dublin and Palo Alto.
Dublin’s arts, literature, music and film
scene of the 1970s and 1980s forced its
‘literary village’ into a close network. Eavan
Boland, among the poets, was distinctive
with her haltingly shy voice, typically in the
company of her less vocally timid peers.
According to her friend Gabrielle
Calvocoressi, she “loved gossip like fish
love water”.
She succeeded me as an international
writing fellow at Iowa University in 1984,
telling me that she felt restricted in Iowa,
having resided on campus with her husband
Kevin Casey and their children.
Boland complained of the local literary
world being male saturated. In ‘Object
Lessons: the life of the Woman and the Poet
in Our Time’ (1995) she states: “women
have moved from being the objects of Irish
poems to being the authors of them”. Her
obvious influences are Sylvia Plath and
Adrienne Rich. She also references classical
feminists such as Kate Millet, Andrea
Dworkin and Erica Jong in the book.
Perhaps this reflects her strong paternal
influences. Frederick ‘Fred’ Boland (1904-
85), worked as a diplomat in Ireland’s Free
State and rose to become not just President
of the UN’s General Assembly but also
Chancellor of Trinity (1964-82).
In April 1945, Mr Boland gave the now
famous advice to De Valera to avoid making
condolences at the German Embassy in
Dublin after Hitler’s suicide. He later took up
the case for re-issuing an Irish passport to
Francis Stuart (1902-2000) in Post-War Paris
when Stuart was persona non grata in
Britain for broadcasting on behalf of
the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft. T
his
actually saved the writer’s bacon. Fred’s
wife was Josephine Kelly, a modernist artist
from Drogheda. They had met in Paris.
Eavan Boland’s work often explores
themes of identity, history, motherhood,
and the domestic sphere, as well as the role
of women in Irish society and literature. But
Boland’s is best extrapolated as nominal
feminism.
She rejected “the nation as woman; the
Only 50 out of the 855
submissions voted for
Boland
Lecky library: named after anti-Home-Rule anti-democrat
58 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 59
life in Dublin’s humdrum Dundrum.
Boland in the end is vaguely feminist,
humanist, political, lyrical, but never erotic
or ‘emotional’, even in artistic extremity.
“Scholarly and feminist” doesn’t do it. For
me the oeuvre is too tame, too suburban.
Funnily enough, Boland’s elevation will
not change the on-campus slang where the
library complex has always been referred to
as the BLU (BolandBerkeley-Lecky-Ussher).
There are many associations that sully the
university, none of course orienting on the
college’s distinguished literary eminences
such as Oliver Goldsmith, Bram Stoker,
Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, Oliver St John
Gogarty, Samuel Beckett, J. P. Donleavy,
Jennifer Johnston and Brendan Kennelly.
When it comes to re-naming, perhaps the
honouring of Eavan Boland can precipitate
further necessary changes.
WEH Lecky (1838-1903) whose statue
remains within the college precincts was a
staunch monarchist, an anti-Home-Ruler,
and indeed anti-democrat as vouched in his
five-volume ‘History of Ireland in the
Eighteenth Century (1892-1896)’.
After Ireland’s 1798 Rebellion, Lecky
assailed Lord Charles Cornwallis who
served as a governor in Ireland after his
surrender at Yorktown led to the end of the
American War of Independence. Lecky
blamed Cornwallis because only 131 rebels
were condemned to death out of 400
apprehended which was “too merciful to the
rebels”. According to the Dictionary of Irish
Biography, “as an Irish landowner”, Lecky
“was horrified by what he regarded as an
unholy alliance of democracy, nationalism,
and socialism. For him Parnellism equalled
agrarian crime”.
James Ussher (1581-1656) was born
before TCD even opened in 1593, but he
became the leading scholar there in his
lifetime. A Biblical exegetist, he was a
staunch Creationist and concocted the
theory that on “nightfall of 22 October 4004
BC” the Cosmos and life as we know it
began. He was 4.3 billion years out. Ussher’s
chronology reads like the pompous
posturing of a simpleton and has, since,
become the subject of common derision. His
ecclesiastical career culminated at the level
of Archbishop. He opportunely became anti-
royalist just in time for the execution of
Charles I by Cromwell who later ordered that
Ussher be given a state funeral, burial in
Westminster Abbey and a key designation
as loyalist to the regime.
George Salmon (1919-1904), an
algebraist and provost, who wanted to deny
women the right to graduate (before
ultimately acquiescing) and who was
hostile to Roman Catholic papal infallibility
is now to be found, in Galway marble, near
the campanile. ‘Ulysses’, written by the
National University soldier, James Joyce,
poked fun at him, when he was sited near
“Trinity’s surly front” on College Green.
Passing the elegant black railings, Leopold
Bloom refers to “tinned salmon”.
Berkeley certainly isn’t the only one who
needs moving on.
Feminism like all revolutions is ongoing
and demands victories in the field. Despite
that, the naming of the Boland library is to
be welcomed.
Meanwhile, the Berkeley memorial window
in the College Chapel and portraits of
Berkeley in the College Art Collection subsist.
McAleese called the renaming “a statement
of intent about the future”. We’ll see.
Boland’s “great
achievement was to move
women from the object
(muse, dream, symbol) of
poetry to the subject who
was writing the poem”
Salmon: may need to move on
