SOURCE: Kavanagh, Peter. “A Poetic Theatre.” In The Story of the Abbey Theatre, pp. 81-90. New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1950.

In the following essay, Kavanagh describes Yeats's interest in producing poetic works and the Catholic Church's suspicions of the Abbey's early plays.

During the early years of the twentieth century the minds of the Irish people were occupied with problems of business and politics. They were thinking only of how they might get on in the world. In the evenings, the peasants would gather round their fires—not to tell stories of romantic Ireland but to listen to someone read The Freeman's Journal, which told them of the struggle for home rule. They had become realists and were applying their newly discovered standard to everything: does it pay? Romance was departing from their lives, and Ireland, like England, was turning into a nation of businessmen.

Irish idealists perceived the...