It is wholly proper that Padraic Colum is best known as poet, for his poems are his most significant contribution to literature…. To dismiss Colum's style as merely straightforward, accurate, or simple, as many critics have done, is to do the craftsmanship of the poetry a considerable disservice. The way Colum says things is very often beautiful and his poetic scenes and the characters as delightful as they are unassuming and familiar. His language is unpretentious and his verse forms are pred...

Padraic Colum was the first of the peasant dramatists, in the strict sense of the word; he was, that is to say, the first to dramatise the realities of rural life in Ireland. Where Synge's fantastic intuition divined human prototypes, Colum's realistic insight revealed local peasant types, whose general significance is subordinate to the immediate purpose of the dramatist. Together they define the limits within which our folk-drama has developed, for none of the later playwrights has added any...

[Though] "Balloon" cannot be regarded as an "intellectual" play, it is none the less true that its writing must have first been impelled by a general idea. To put it briefly, Mr. Colum purports to show that a man's acts are significant only as they are expressions of his own inner being, and that a world where action becomes a value in itself is a ludicrous and empty show. But this is the world we live in; and in the play it is represented by the great hotel in Megalopolis...

Padraic Colum has been acknowledged as a master of the Irish faerie: the quaint and leprechaunish peasants have been celebrated by him in prose and verse. This is simply not true. His tales for children include fairy stories, but Colum is the vigorous, hard-headed spokesman of the true peasant, the recorder of the historic fate of Ireland; and even in the books for the young he has never talked down but has sought to hand down both the historic and mythic past. As poet and playwright and essayist—and...

Those who have followed the work of Padraic Colum from its beginnings in "Wild Earth" have always looked forward to the novel which one felt he could and would write. That anticipation is not disappointed in "Castle Conquer." In spite of the years that have slipped by since he gave us that first book of poems, since "The Land," "The Fiddler's House," and "Thomas Muskerry" established him in an unassailable position in the Irish The...

["Balloon"] is a four act comedy in prose. The jacket says "it is the first play to be based on modern philosophical ideas. The action takes place in a 'Spenglerian' world in which life has become externalized and where the idea of height and distance is dominant." Perhaps that is the matter with it. Or perhaps that is the matter with me. I have only the haziest notion of what a "Spenglerian" world is, and the ideas of height and distance become domina...

Padraic Colum is one of the most gifted, if not the most gifted, of the younger Irish poets…. Some of the other younger Irish poets have seemed to echo Mr. W. B. Yeats, as was indeed quite natural; but Mr. Colum by no means wears the mantle of the older poet. Whereas Mr. Yeats' own dreams are usually reflected in his poems representing peasant life, or whereas Mr. Yeats almost always sees the peasant through the glamour of "old mythologies," Mr. Colum gives us the peasant as near...

Written over the past 10 years, ["The Flying Swans"] lacks momentum, as works extended over a period of time often do. It sprawls rather than drives through a 538-page account of the childhood and youth of Ulick O'Rehill. The narrative is a series of jerky jumps from scene to scene. The numerous characters dragged in and out of the action tend to be flat when they are not blurred. But as a nineteenth-century Irish pastoral, "The Flying Swans" is an evocative book. In the e...

A broad plain, frequently accented by little hills, would certainly form an appropriate metaphor to describe the effect of Padraic Colum's new novel [The Flying Swans]…. I would not recommend this contemplative book to the kind of reader who expects a novel to give him a roller-coaster ride, on which, once pinned down by the safety bar, he is swept breathless up dizzy heights and hurtled screaming down dizzier depths, until the vehicle deposits him, retching and staggering, on firm ground once...

[Mogu, the Wanderer] is fantastic and full of authentic oriental color. It moves in a world, both physically and psychologically remote, where Fate, though never actually present to the eye, is really the chief actor. It is a world intrinsically democratic where, by Fate's intervention, a beggar and his daughter may serve as lofty a purpose as a king. There Fate makes all, least and greatest, but the puppets of its will. The actors suffer and rejoice, and believe themselves to be acting freely, but h...

The material [of Castle Conquer] is rich and interesting: a feudal Ireland for a background; a plot of political conspiracy and peasant revolt; a love tale; Irish tenant farmers, peddlers, soldiers, landowners; Irish songs, frolics, dancing, fairs. The prose is fresh and easy-flowing. And a music comes into it by way of lovely Irish names and the peculiar Irish-English dialog. Nor, given the peasant rhythm, can one seriously object to the book's slow movement, or to the somewhat episodic way in which...