When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything

“When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?” Thus confessed Eavan Boland, a poet who carved her voice into the living stone of tradition, and in so doing, reshaped the very inheritance that once seemed to exclude her. Her words carry the weight of every soul who has felt the pressure of history, of every writer who has longed to speak in their own tongue yet felt bound by the voices of the dead.

The meaning of this saying lies in the tension between tradition and individuality. Authorship, to Boland, was not only the act of writing but the act of claiming authority within a lineage of poets. Yet the Irish canon was filled with grandeur, with heroes and myths, with a masculine voice that left little room for the intimate experiences of women. For her, every attempt to write felt shadowed by that ghost hand—the weight of centuries pressing against her own desire to speak honestly of her life, her womanhood, her domestic world.

The origin of this struggle was Ireland itself, a land where poetry was not a private pastime but a public inheritance. Irish poetry, rich with myth and rebellion, was a monument—majestic, but also intimidating. To a young woman who wished to speak of kitchens, of motherhood, of love and fragility, the tradition seemed immovable, “heavy with custom.” Her question—“Where could my life, my language fit in?”—is not merely personal but universal: how does the individual voice find space beneath the vast roof of tradition?

History provides many echoes of this conflict. Consider Virgil, who sought to write his Aeneid under the towering shadow of Homer. He too must have wondered whether his Roman voice could fit within the Greek epic tradition. Or think of Emily Dickinson, who wrote in seclusion, creating her own language of dashes and silences against the heavy customs of nineteenth-century American verse. Like Boland, they felt the pressure of tradition as both guide and restraint, and yet, by confronting it, they reshaped it for generations to come.

The lesson here is that tradition is both weight and foundation. It can feel like a prison, but it can also be a wellspring. The ghost hand is both the burden of the past and the guidance of it. To write, to create, to live authentically within such a legacy requires courage: the courage to honor what came before, yet to refuse silence when your own truth seeks expression. Boland teaches us that each life, however small it may seem beside the grandeur of history, has its rightful place within the great chorus of human language.

Practically, this means that we must not let tradition silence us, but neither must we ignore it. Read deeply, learn from the voices of the past, but then turn inward and ask: What do I alone see? What truth is mine to speak? Write that truth, live that truth, even if at first it feels unworthy beside the monuments of custom. In time, you may find that your truth is not only worthy but necessary, and that the tradition itself grows larger because you dared to enter it.

Thus the teaching endures: authorship is not merely inheritance, it is also rebellion. Irish poetry may have been “heavy with custom,” but Eavan Boland’s voice broke through, and in breaking through, it expanded what Irish poetry could be. Let us remember her courage, and let us follow her path: when the ghost hand presses against ours, let us not yield, but write with it, against it, and beyond it—until our own lives, our own languages, find their rightful place in the eternal book of humanity.