John Millington Synge is one of the foremost dramatists of the twentieth century, but his compositions in verse are hardly as recognized. Yet Synge, whose work is practically synonymous with the Irish literary renaissance of the early twentieth century, wrote lyric poetry throughout his rather short literary career. Patrick Kavanagh considered Synge at least "a minor poet, but an authentic one." Nevertheless, while Synge's plays are judged major and his poems minor, this distinction seems unnecessarily restrictive because much of the language of the plays is authentically poetic prose. One finds in Synge's lyric poetry a quality, if not a quantity, comparable to his plays. An understanding of Synge's lyric poetry, perhaps even more than the dramatic work, provides biographical insights into what Yeats considered "the genius of Synge."

Raised in Dublin's environs, Synge was the son of John Hatch and Kathleen Traill Synge, members of the Protestant...