George Bernard Shaw provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in
Mary Devenport O'Neill Colum, W. B. Yeats, Richard Irvine Best, Frank O'Connor, Francis Stuart and Iseult Gonne. She became particularly close to Yeats, who she confided in. Yeats' recorded their weekly consultations in his diary while O'Neill was writing "A vision" (1925). In his "Oxford anthology of English verse" from 1936, he included one of O'Neill's poems. In 1917, she contributed lyrics to her husband's play "The kingdom maker". She published her only book in 1929, "Prometheus and other poems". After this she occasionally contributed primarily modernist plays and poetry to "The Dublin Magazine", "The Irish Times" and "The Bell". O'Neill collaborated with