Talk:John Millington Synge/Workshop

Selected excerpts from sources

Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks

Ellmann (1918−1987) was a critic and biographer of Synge and other writers

• 1 "he drew into creative activity Synge and Lady Gregory"
• 130 On the history of the Irish dramatic movement: "John Synge, who had planned to devote his life to writing critical articles on French writers for the English press, suddenly built a fantastic drama out of Irish life."
• 137 brief mention of Shadow of the Glen as "more substantial fare" than a Yeats play; it "diverted the movement from Yeats's half-religious intentions."
• 151 Yeats was in Paris and met John Synge, who was there to write critical articles on contemporary French writers. "Yeats persuaded him that Symons had already covered the field and urged him to go to Aran and learn style from the peasants", advice that Synge eventually took.

Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865−1939) Irish poet, and friend to Yeats

• 138 "...John Synge, the greatest dramatic genius of Ireland."
• 229 ff. WBY (age 31) first met JMS Autumn 1896 when Synge was 31
• 253 while speaking with Lady Gregory about the project for an Irish theater: "... I no more foresaw her genius than I foresaw that of John Synge ..."
• 278 Yeats states that Arthur Griffith was the "slanderer of Lane and Synge"
• 307 "Synge was a sick man picturing energy, a doomed man picturing gaiety"
• 327 writing of critics of the Theatre and Lady Gregory, "our base half-men of letters, or rather half-journalists, that coterie of patriots who have never been bought because no one ever thought them worth a price" -- "When I think, too, of Synge dying at this moment of their bitterness and ignorance ...
  

"Those who accuse Synge of some base motive are the great-grandchildren of those Dublin men who accused Smith O'Brien of being paid by the Government to fail. It is of such as these Goethe thought when he said, "The Irish always seem to me like a pack of hounds dragging down a noble stag."

• 330 Synge "is certainly too ill to work himself, and will be for a long time."
• 335 on Young Ireland artist poets and poetry: "... I did not see, until Synge began to write, that we must renounce the deliberate creation of a kind of Holy City in the imagination, and express the individual. The Irish people were not educated enough to accept images more profound, more true to human nature, than the schoolboy thoughts of Young Ireland."
• 335-36 The works of Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Grady, Lionel Johnson, and WBY showed that "a school of journalists with simple moral ideas could find right building material to create an historical and literary nationalism as powerful as the old and nobler."
• 342-43 Molly Allgood is sent by Synge to WBY. Synge is dying and is no longer eating. Yeats writes "I feel Synge's coming death now less than when he first became ill. I am used to the thought of it and I find that I do not pity him. I pity her. He is fading out of life....One does not feel that death is evil when one meets it—evil I mean, for the one who dies.... The wildest sorrow that comes at the thought of death is, I think, 'Ages will pass over and no one ever again look on that nobleness or that beauty.'"
• 343 "Synge is dead. In the early morning he said to the nurse, 'It is no use fighting death any longer,' and he turned over and died." He may have known for weeks he was dying but did not mention it; "He would have no fuss. He was like that."
• 350 Molly's premonitions of his death
• 352-53 "Synge was the rushing up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a furious impartiality, and indifferent turbulent sorrow. His work, like that of Burns, was to say all the people did not want to have said. He was able to do this because Nature had made him incapable of a political idea." (emphasis added)
• 355 "I remembered his extreme gentleness in the last weeks, that air of being done with ambition and conflict."
• 358 "Is not style,' as Synge once said to me, 'born out of the shock of new material?'"
• 378 The Irish Dramatic Movement, Lecture to the Royal Academy of Sweden (Nobel lecture). 15 December 1923. Also available online at the Nobel website at William Butler Yeats: Nobel Lecture; may be better to cite that instead of the Autobiography.
• 384 Account of how Yeats met John Synge in Paris in 1896 when he was told of a poor Irishman living on the top floor of his hotel. He was from an old Irish family, "was simple and courteous". He traveled around Europe, often on foot, and played his fiddler for those he met "He was the man that we needed, because he was the only man I have ever known incapable of a political thought or of a humanitarian purpose. He could walk the roadside all day with some poor man without any desire to do him good or for any reason except that he liked him." He was to do for Ireland, though more by his influence on other dramatists than by his direct influence, what Robert Burns did for Scotland."
  Yeats advised him to go to Aran "and study its life because that life 'had never been expressed in literature.' ... When he found that wild island he became happy for the first time, escaping, as he said, 'from the nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor.'"
• 385-86 WBY summarized the origin and plot of Playboy, and says: "Picturesque, poetical, fantastical, a masterpiece of style and of music, the supreme work of our dialect theatre, his Playboy roused the populace to fury. ... Synge has described, through an exaggerated symbolism, a reality which he loved precisely because he loved all reality. So far from being, as they thought, a politician working in the interests of England, he was so little a politician that the world merely amused him and touched his pity."