, poet
, prose
writer, and collector of folklore
. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival
and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre
. He is best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World
, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.
Although he came from an Anglo-Irish
background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism
of their world view.
Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease
, a form of cancer at the time untreatable.
What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?
I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,The gray and wintry sides of many glens,And did but half remember human words,In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.
I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.
I asked if I got sick and died, would youWith my black funeral go walking too,If you’d stand close to hear them talk or prayWhile I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.
Lord, confound this surly sister,Blight her brow with blotch and blister,Cramp her larynx, lung and liver,In her guts a galling give her.
These are rotten, so you’re the QueenOf all are living, or have been.
When I was writing In the Shadow of the Glen|The Shadow of the Glen 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 servent girls in the kitchen.
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.
May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy divils in the twists of the road, and one old timber leg on him to limp into the scalding grave. There he is now crossing the strands, and that the Lord God would send a high wave to wash him from the world.