"What Was Their Utopia?"

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

“What Was Their Utopia?” typescript draft

May 16, 1916

Gregory completed this essay on May 16, 1916, and 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 and politically ineffective. But she answers that question with an emphatic conviction that, through their vision and decisive self-sacrifice, they were unquestionably poets. Quoting Percy Shelley and Walt Whitman, she declares that the “visions of poets” are “the most solid announcement of any” and essential to the pursuit of freedom. The essay remained unpublished until 2016. Along with her letters to Yeats—which he acknowledged were of “historical importance”—it was a contributing influence towards his as-yet unwritten poem “Easter, 1916.”