orm." 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."

RUDYARD KIPLING

New tendencies are contagious. But they also disclose themselves
simultaneously in places and people where there has been no point of
contact. Even before Synge published his proofs of the keen poetry in
everyday life, Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different
manner, the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded as
too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England had quite
recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggishness and
pre-Raphaelit