The year was 1896 and the place was the Latin Quarter of Paris. Two of Ireland's finest poets and playwrights, W.B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, met for the first time, and Yeats bestowed on the younger writer an unusually fruitful piece of advice: "Go to the Aran Islands," Yeats told Synge. "Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression."

Synge was Irish, but considering his Paris address and upper-class Protestant background in Dublin, Yeats might as well have told him to go to Timbuktu. At that time, the Gaelic-speaking islands off the west coast of Ireland were the furthest fringes of Europe, where islanders eked out a living fishing mackerel from handmade canoes.

Synge took the advice, and his years spent listening to the islanders' Gaelic-English in peat-smoky huts helped him create a whole new language for plays like "Playboy of the Western World." No one in Dublin's stiff drawing rooms talked like its sharp-tongued, bold heroine, Pegeen Mike.

There was only one place further afield still than the Arans, and Synge visited it, too, possibly drawing his inspiration for Pegeen there: the Great Blasket Island, a grand name for a speck of land off the coast of County Kerry. In his book on the island, Robert Kanigel writes that even settled into the remote Arans, Synge worried that English had penetrated too much. So he set off for the Great Blasket, where English was known but not spoken well, perfected his Gaelic, and wrote the first published account of life there: "The whole sight of wild islands and sea was as clear and as cold and brilliant as what one sees in a dream."

When Yeats said that life on the islands had never found expression, he meant it literally. At that time, most of the islanders on the Arans and on Great Blasket could not read or write. One might think that Synge's account of the latter would touch it with the sort of literary glory that comes once in the lifetime of a small community with a few dozen houses huddled together. But as Kanigel's book recounts, once the idea of the place as a bastion of linguistic purity and creativity took hold, it attracted a stream of visitors who wrote about the island, attracting still more visitors.

After Synge came a young Norwegian linguist, a British classicist who used his experience of oral literature there to understand Homer, a French linguist and an Irish literary gadabout. Kanigel organizes his book around these long visits to the island, which gives it a pleasantly episodic tone.

The visitors, especially the linguists, made close friends, or what anthropologists would call key informants, who taught them Gaelic and led them through life on the island. The first stop for any visitor was an ri, the "king," a man chosen not for his bloodline but for his qualities of leadership. The second stop was the modest cottage of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, the only islander who knew how to read and write Gaelic. One of the visitors to the island, Robin Flower, convinced him that given his "inborn genius for speech" he should write his memoirs. "The Islandman," published in 1929, became an instant classic of Gaelic and, translated to English, a sensation in the wider world.

Kanigel avoids pushing any thesis about the advantages of premodern life, and instead points out the glories of the island and its inhabitants, and if the whole book is imbued with a green-colored nostalgia, it is understandable because the Great Blasket as its islanders described it, ceased to exist a half century ago.

In 1947, the island's population was bled by emigration, and an islander died of meningitis "with most of the island community helpless at his bedside" because a storm had cut off access with the outside world. Éamon de Valera, hero of the Irish Republic, heard the story and decided the islanders should be resettled on the mainland. In 1953, the final 21 inhabitants of the island repatriated to the mainland and an observer recalled an old lady in a black shawl trudging slowly up the path to her new home: "She cried every step of the way."