Richard Crashaw

English poet

• Born: c. 1612
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: August 21, 1649
• Place of death: Loreto (now in Italy)

Crashaw was a member of the Metaphysical movement in English poetics in the early seventeenth century. Unlike other prominent Metaphysical poets, however, his poetry was strongly marked by his conversion to Catholicism. He was also heavily influenced by Spanish mysticism and the style of the Italian poet Marini.

Early Life

Richard Crashaw’s father, William Crashaw, was an Anglican priest in London noted for his strong anti-Catholic (and possibly Puritan) convictions; his surviving writings document his hatred of the Jesuits. Richard’s mother died when he was six or seven years of age; his father remarried in 1619. Richard’s stepmother seems to have been a loving parent, but she died in childbirth the year after her marriage. William Crashaw died in 1626, but he left Richard no inheritance. Two lawyers who were friends of his father paid for Richard’s education at Charterhouse School, to which he was admitted in 1629. The master of Charterhouse, Robert Brooke, most likely had a formative influence on the poet, contributing to his later Royalist politics.

Crashaw was a promising student, and on July 6, 1631, he was admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge University. Cambridge was a center of High Anglicanism, that branch of the Church of English that—though opposed to the authority of the Pope—adhered to rites and liturgical practices regarded by Puritans as too close to those of the Roman Catholic Church. The great Anglican preacher Lancelot Andrewes had been a master of Pembroke, and his influence continued while Crashaw was in attendance. Crashaw received a B.A. in 1634 and proceeded to Peterhouse College, where he was granted a fellowship in 1635. While at Peterhouse, certainly by 1639, he was ordained to the priesthood. The High Anglican climate Crashaw experienced at Pembroke continued at Peterhouse, whose master, John Cosin, was the author of an influential book of prayers, A Collection of Private Devotions (1627).

During these years, Crashaw also maintained a close association with Little Gidding, an Anglican religious community established in 1626 by Nicholas Ferrar for his family and friends. Crashaw enjoyed worshipping in the chapel established by Ferrar, a place visited by King Charles I and, much later, by the modern poet T. S. Eliot, for whom it became the inspiration for the last of his Four Quartets (1943). As the influence of Puritanism spread throughout England, High Church Anglicans came increasingly under threat. In 1644, Crashaw, Cosin, and other leaders at Peterhouse were expelled by order of Parliament, and in 1646, a year after the king’s visit, Little Gidding was raided by a group of Puritan soldiers who stripped it of its “Popish” crosses, altar vessels, and cloth hangings.

Life’s Work

By the time Crashaw reached Cambridge, he was already a published poet, having contributed poems to Lancelot Andrewes’s XCVI Sermons (1629). He continued to write while at the university, and soon published Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (1634), which contains 178 Latin epigrams, brief poems of several lines each that offer concise observations. Crashaw’s epigrams focus mostly on religious topics. The epigram has a history reaching back to such classical practitioners as the first century Roman poet Martial; it relies for effect on wittily inventive turns of phrase, an often sarcastic tone, and the use of striking paradox, devices frequently seen in the Metaphysical poetry of John Donne . Unlike the socially scathing epigrams of Martial, however, Crashaw’s poems are focused on the theological contradictions of Christian faith and mock those persons who seem unable to accept those contradictions.

Around 1637, Crashaw completed a translation of the first book of Italian poet Giambattista Marini’s La strage degli innocenti (1632; The Slaughter of the Innocents , 1675). Like the rest of the work, Sospetto d’Herode (The Suspicion of Herod , 1637) explored the New Testament theme of the massacre of innocents. Marini (1569-1625) has given his name to Marinism, a mannered and self-consciously witty style of poetry that bears some parallels with the English Metaphysical style. Crashaw freely imitated Marini’s farfetched ingenuity and extravagantly sensual ornamentation, stylistic features that contribute to Crashaw’s reputation as one of the most Baroque English poets of his day.

Crashaw actually left Cambridge in 1643, the year before his official explusion was announced, fleeing to the safety of Holland. At some point shortly after his departure from Cambridge, he met Queen Henrietta Maria , who wrote a letter of introduction for him in 1646 to the pope. By this time, he had done something which would have scandalized his father—Crashaw had become a Roman Catholic. His travels took him from Holland to Paris, where he was discovered living in poverty by the poet Abraham Cowley , a friend from his Peterhouse days. In late 1646, he reached Rome, where he gained a clerical appointment from Cardinal Pallota.

Also in 1646, Crashaw first published Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with Other Delights of the Muses (1646, 1648). The volume’s title pays tribute to George Herbert’s volume of Metaphysical religious verse The Temple (1633), published thirteen years earlier. Among the secular “delights” in this volume are a number of elegies, an assortment of poems in praise of the monarchy and Charles I, and several love poems. The book also contains one of Crashaw’s most characteristically Baroque poems, “Musicks Duell,” which depicts a contest between a nightingale and a lutenist.

The 1648 edition of Steps to the Temple added several new religious poems, notably “The Flaming Heart,” Crashaw’s verse rendition of Saint Teresa of Ávila’s moment of religious ecstasy as recorded in her autobiography. (It is not known whether Crashaw, when in Rome, saw Bernini’s famous sculpture of this event.) The careful balancing of religious and erotic imagery in the poem is typically Baroque in its intensity: Crashaw refers to Teresa as “thou undaunted daughter of desires!”—just the sort of emotional “excess” condemned by the Puritans.

Three years after his death, Crashaw’s Carmen Deo Nostro (1652) was published. It was composed almost exclusively of previously published religious verse, but it did contain a significant new poem, “To the Noblest and Best of Ladies, the Countess of Denbigh.” The countess’s husband had been killed in 1643, fighting in the Royalist army; she visited Paris with the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria the following year, and Crashaw’s poem represents his attempt to convert her from her Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic faith. It is one of many literary works of Crashaw’s day addressing the religious doubts of persons caught in the denominational quarrels of the time and attempting to resolve their theological questions. The poem is a parody of a seduction verse, seeking to convince the countess through sensual imagery that nevertheless carries a religious intent (“Unfold at length, unfold, fair flower,/ And use the season of love’s shower”).

In April of 1649, Crashaw was given a position at the shrine at Loreto, but shortly after arriving there in August, he contracted a fever and died.

Significance

Next to the compact metaphors of Donne or the more accessible yet still surprising conceits of Herbert, Crashaw’s verse often seems exaggerated, emotionally intense, or even obsessive in its attention to images of blood, fire, tears, and physical sensation. Crashaw’s poetry, however, is a noteworthy English contribution to the broad European movement of Baroque art, which sought to hold in delicate tension strongly contradictory feelings, forces, or intellectual convictions. While much of Crashaw’s verse was written before his conversion, he represents a valuable Roman Catholic element within the dominantly Anglican outlook of English poetry during the Caroline monarchy, underscoring the fact that English poetry of this era was as varied as the culture that produced it.

Bibliography

Davidson, Clifford. “The Anglican Setting of Richard Crashaw’s Devotional Verse.” Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 259-76. Calls attention to the significant poems Crashaw wrote while still an Anglican and challenges Crashaw’s usual categorization as simply a Catholic poet.

Netzley, Ryan. “Oral Devotion: Eucharistic Theology and Richard Crashaw’s Religious Lyrics.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44, no. 3 (Fall, 2002): 247-272. Counters criticism of Crashaw’s seeming obsession with mouths and bodily orifices by arguing that he is deeply concerned with poetic variations upon the Catholic Eucharist, a sacrament of oral communion with God.

Parrish, Paul. Richard Crashaw. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. A concise overview of the poet’s life and work, with a chronology and selected bibliography.

Roberts, John R., ed. New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw. Columbia, Mo.: University of Columbia Press, 1990. Twelve essays explore aspects of Crashaw’s life, poetry, and education. Contains a bibliography of modern studies of Crashaw.

Sabine, Maureen. Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Macmillan, 1992. Chapters 4 through 7 discuss the feminine aspects of divinity as expressed through Crashaw’s verse, as well as female personages contained in it, such as the Virgin Mary, Saint Teresa of Ávila, and the Countess of Denbigh. Contains a useful bibliography.

Warren, Austin. Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensiblity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939. Reprint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957. Still one of the best studies of Crashaw’s links to the Baroque movement in European culture.

Young, R. V. Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: D. S. Brewer, 2000. A study of the theological themes present in the work of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. Comments in most detail upon “A Letter to the Countess of Denbigh” from Carmen Deo Nostro, with shorter discussions of several other poems.