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J. M. Synge |
John Millington Synge grew up in Dublin studying the piano, the violin, and the flute, but he switched to literature after college and moved to Paris. There he met Yeats and got the advice that changed his life: go to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland and find your voice among the peasants and the fisherman of those primitive villages. The plays and poems he wrote after that defined the new Irish theater, realistic, violent, skeptical, and soaked in the country’s pagan folklore. But the beauty of what he was creating was not recognized at the time. In 1907, on the first night of his masterpiece, Playboy of the Western World, members of the audience were so offended they shouted down the third act and were charged with mayhem.
There was never time for reconciliation. Synge was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and died two years later, one of the greatest dramatists in Irish literature. Yeats wrote of him after his death: “He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself.”
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |