Crossways

Abstract

Crossways was a heading first given by Yeats to a group of poems in P (1895), most of which were taken from an earlier volume (WO), with the exception of two ballads, ‘The Ballad of Father O’Hart’ and ‘The Ballad of the Foxhunter’, which, as Yeats wrote in the Preface to P (1895), were ‘written at the same time, though published later’, in CK. The title Crossways was adopted because in these poems he ‘tried many pathways’ (P (1895)). Yeats commented, in a note dated 1925, that

Many of the poems in Crossways, certainly those upon Indian subjects or upon shepherds and fauns, must have been written before I was twenty, for from the moment I began The Wanderings of Oisin, which I did at that age, I believe, my subject matter became Irish. (CP)