Preface to Cuchalain of Muirthemne

Draft typescript with revisions in W. B. Yeats’s hand

Preface to Cuchalain of Muirthemne

1902

In Dramatis Personae, written after Lady Gregory’s death, Yeats recalled that she was at first “friend and hostess, a centre of peace, an adviser . . . but neither she nor we thought her a possible creator.” With the publication of Cuchulain of Muirthemne, however, “now all in a moment, it seemed, she became the founder of Irish dialect literature.”

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations