In the notable introduction to the _Playboy of the Western World_, Synge declared, "When I was writing _The Shadow of the Glen_ some years ago, 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 servant girls in the kitchen. This matter is, I think, of some importance; for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words--and at the same time to give the reality which is at the root of all poetry, in a natural and comprehensive form." 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