In discussing the position of the aspirant Irish writer of the 1920s and 1930s, Terence Brown observes that, for such an author, ‘the anxiety of influence pressed with a peculiarly intimate insistence. He was perhaps a rueful late guest at a literary feast celebrated as the Irish Literary Revival.’ The Revival – that flowering of Irish cultural endeavour from the 1880s to the 1920s, which drew heavily on a romanticised version of a mythical Irish past – cast a long shadow which extended, of course, well beyond the early decades of the twentieth century. Neil Corcoran, in his contribution to this present volume, discusses the ways in which Heaney struggled to come to terms with, in particular, the Yeatsian inheritance. In general terms, however, Heaney has clearly valued the work of the Revivalists, seeing them as offering a kind of cultural sustenance to their literary successors. A certain ‘nourishment’, he observes ‘became available more abundantly to us as a result of the achievements of the Irish Literary Revival, and much of its imaginative protein was extracted from the sense of place’ they provided (P 136).

The ‘sense of place’ evoked by Revivalist writers was a complex construct, being tied to specific locations (Coole Park, the Aran Islands, Thoor Ballylee, etc.), but also being heavily overlaid with mythologies of various kinds (Celticist, Ascendancy, Classical, etc.). At times the Revivalist writers also appeared to operate at one remove from their subject matter. Thus J. M. Synge famously observed in the Preface to The Playboy of the Western World that, when he was writing an earlier play (The Shadow of the Glen), he ‘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 servant girls in the kitchen’. Synge appears in this image as a middle-class metropolitan straining to catch the accents and attitudes of ordinary rural life from a closeted distance. His writing has thus sometimes been criticised as presenting overdrawn caricatures, his characters speaking a language that fails to equate to any natural Irish speech.