“What Was Their Utopia?”

Lady Gregory

“What Was Their Utopia?”

May 16, 1916

Typescript draft

After Gregory completed this essay on May 16, 1916, she sent it to Yeats. She begins by anxiously wondering whether the Rising’s leaders had given to their plans the “intensity of thought” needed to discipline strong feeling into coherent principles. If not, their action might be merely utopian. But she answers that question with an emphatic conviction that, through their vision and decisive self-sacrifice, they were unquestionably poets. The essay remained unpublished until 2016. Along with her letters to Yeats—which he acknowledged were of “historical importance”—it was a contributing influence toward his as-yet unwritten poem “Easter, 1916.”

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