Books: On & On with Sean

ROSE AND CROWN (323 pp.)—Sean O'Casey—Macmillan ($4.75).

In 1929, William Butler Yeats wrote to Sean O'Casey explaining why the Abbey Theater was rejecting The Silver Tassie, Sean's new play about World War I. "I am sad and discouraged," Yeats complained. "You have no theme. You were interested in the Irish Civil War and at every moment of those plays wrote out of your own amusement with life or your sense of its tragedy . . . but you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields, never walked its hospitals, and so write out of your...