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The Playboy as Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James F. Kilroy
James F. Kilroy*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.
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Abstract

In The Playboy of the Western World Synge portrays the successive stages in the artistic growth of a poet. Christy Mahon develops markedly from the time when he shyly and tersely answers questions on his crime. Gradually, his flat statements give way to more daring and assertive speech so that others remark on his poetic power. Their praise generates further poetic attempts, and Christy's speech becomes both more concrete in diction and more deliberately imaginative. But when he discovers that his poetry was not based on actual fact, his speech changes distinctly: it temporarily becomes self-conscious and hollow. Inevitably the crowd turns on him, but the playboy rises above them and their objections; the very audience which nurtured the growing poet eventually threatens him in his maturity, and must be disregarded by the poet, since it cannot understand the imaginative truth of his statements. The artistic growth of the main character is signified by a variety of styles; thus the play supplies examples of Synge's best poetry, but also deliberate exaggerations of poetic expression.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , May 1968 , pp. 439 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 Letter to Irish Times, dated 30 Jan. 1907, quoted in David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, M. Synge, 1871–1909 (New York, 1959), p. 244.

2 T. R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London, 1956), p. 204; Hugh H. MacLean, “The Hero as Playboy,” UR, xxi (Autumn 1954), 9–19; David H. Greene, “The Playboy and Irish Nationalism,” JEGP, XLVI (April 1947), 199–204; Norman Podhoretz, “Synge's Playboy: Morality and the Hero,” EIC, HI (July 1953), 337–344.

3 Maurice Bourgeois, John Millingion Synge and the Irish Theatre (London, 1913), p. 205; and Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (London, 1961), pp. 161–180.

4 Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork, 1931), p. 197.

5 The Playboy of the Western World, in The Works of John M. Synge (Dublin, 1910), sii, 23. Subsequent references to this work are incorporated into the text.

6 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland (Dublin, 1925), pp. 193–246.

7 From an unpublished draft of a preface to the poems, in Collected Works, Vol. II: Prose (London, 1966), p. x.

8 Collected Works, Vol. I: Poems (London, 1962), p. xxxvi.

9 The Autobiography of J. M. Synge, ed. Alan Price (Dublin, 1965).

10 In Collected Poems (New York, 1956), p. 318.