“Athens - a Reverie.”

Thomas MacDonagh

“Athens - a Reverie.”

1899

Autograph manuscript poem

Thomas MacDonagh’s short career was principally a literary one. He founded The Irish Review Literary Magazine, along with Padraic Colum and James Stephens, and became the first staff member at Padraic Pearse’s St. Enda’s School. As a poet, he wrote several volumes of verse and saw his plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. With Pearse, his cultural nationalism eventually turned political. One of seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, MacDonagh was executed by the British for his leadership in the Rising. This manuscript in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) was published posthumously in The Poetical Works of Thomas MacDonagh (1916).