In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his _Wanderings of Oisin_; in
the same year Douglas Hyde, the scholar and folk-lorist, brought out
his _Book of Gaelic Stories_.
The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish literature may be
said to date from the publication of those two books. The fundamental
idea of both men and their followers was the same. It was to create a
literature which would express the national consciousness of Ireland
through a purely national art. They began to reflect the strange
background of dreams, politics, suffering and heroism that is
immortally Irish. This community of fellowship and aims is to be found
in the varied but allied work of William Butler Yeats, "A. E." (George
W. Russell), Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, Padraic
Colum and others. The first fervor gone, a short period of dullness
set in. After reanimating the old myths, surcharging the legendary
heroes with a new significance, it seemed for a while that the
movement would lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing
concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the tramp, followed;
an interest that was something of a reaction against the influence of
Yeats and his mystic otherworldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic
Revival reached its height with John Millington Synge, who was not
only the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote such
contrary critics as George Moore and Harold Williams) "one of the
greatest dramatists who has written in English." Synge's poetry,
brusque and all too small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him
and yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its content is
never great but the raw vigor in it was to serve as a bold banner--a
sort of a brilliant Jolly Roger--for the younger men of the following
period. It was not only this dramatist's brief verses and his
intensely musical prose but his sharp prefaces that were to exercise
such an influence.
In the notable introduction to the _Playboy of the Western World_,
Synge declared, "When I was writing _The Shadow of the Glen_ some
years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a
chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that
let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.
This matter is, I think, of some importance; for in countries where
the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and
living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his
words--and at the same time to give the reality which is at the root
of all poetry, in a natural and comprehensive form." This quotation
explains his idiom, possibly the sharpest-flavored and most vivid in
modern literature.
As to Synge's poetic power, it is unquestionably greatest in his
plays. In _The Well of the Saints_, _The Playboy of the Western World_
and _Riders to the Sea_ there are more poignance, beauty of form and
richness of language than in any piece of dramatic writing since
Elizabethan times. Yeats, when he first heard Synge's early one-act
play, _The Shadow of the Glen_, is said to have exclaimed "Euripides."
A half year later when Synge read him _Riders to the Sea_, Yeats again
confined his enthusiasm to a single word:--"AEschylus!" Years have
shown that Yeats's appreciation was not as exaggerated as many might
suppose.
But although Synge's poetry was not his major concern, numbering only
twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a
surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure,
a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of
his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of
his associates. In that memorable preface to his _Poems_ he wrote what
was a slogan, a manifesto and at the same time a classic _credo_ for
all that we call the "new" poetry. "I have often thought," it begins,
"that at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, modern
verse contains a great deal of poetic material, using 'poetic' in the
same special sense. The poetry of exaltation will be always the
highest; but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and
cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely
to lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease to build
beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops....
Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successfully by
itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show
that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood."