Richard Crashaw

The English poet Richard Crashaw (C. 1612-1649) was Roman Catholic in sensibility and ultimately inallegiance. His poetry is the single major body of work in English that can be called baroque.

Richard Crashaw was born in London. His father, a stern Puritan who hated the Church of Rome as much as he did worldly pleasures—his son was to share the latter of his prejudices but not the former—was preacher at the Temple Church. Crashaw was educated at the Charterhouse, where he received a rigorous classical education under the tutelage of a royalist master. He had already indicated his poetic talent and religious sensibility in poems in Latin and Greek before he entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1631.

At the university Crashaw found himself in the matrix of an extraordinary number of the period's best poets: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton, to name some of the most important. His own college was High Church in ritual and spiritual allegiance. In 1634 Crashaw received a bachelor of arts degree, and in 1635 he was elected a fellow of Peterhouse, which was strongly influenced by the conservative, High Church archbishop William Laud. In fact, the religious atmosphere of this college was scarcely distinguishable from Roman Catholicism. During the years that followed, Crashaw participated often in the life of the religious establishment at Little Gidding, a village near Cambridge. By 1639 he was an ordained preacher.

The civil war, however, changed his life. Cromwell seized Cambridge in 1643 and efficiently rooted out all traces of "popery." Crashaw did not wait to be ejected from his fellowship by the Puritans but left at the beginning of the occupation and spent the rest of his life in exile at Little Gidding and Oxford and on the Continent. The civil war deprived him of a successful career as preacher and probably of continued participation in the Anglican Church. His years of exile were dogged by poverty, ill health, and neglect by his patrons. Crashaw became a Roman Catholic in 1645. He died in 1649 in Loreto, Italy, where he was in the service of Cardinal Pallota.

Crashaw's major poetry appeared in Steps to the Temple in 1646 (enlarged in 1648). Though the title suggests the dominance of George Herbert, the major influences in fact are the spirit and esthetic techniques of the Continental Counter Reformation, which produced the arts known as baroque. The major poetic influence was the Italian Giambattista Marino, some of whose work Crashaw translated. Crashaw's baroque poetry, exemplified in "The Weeper," thrives on paradox, imagery flamboyant to the point of grotesquerie, stock religious symbols, and concern with martyrdom and mysticism.

Further Reading

The standard work on Crashaw, equally useful for historical and literary backgrounds, biography, and critical interpretation, is Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (1939).

Additional Sources

New perspectives on the life and art of Richard Crashaw, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.

Willey, Basil, Richard Crashaw (1612/13-1649): a memorial lecture delivered at Peterhouse, Cambridge, on 11 July 1949, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978. □

Crashaw, Richard (1612/13–49), poet, became a Catholic convert c.1645 and fled to Paris, where his friend Cowley persuaded Queen Henrietta Maria to interest herself on his behalf. Through her influence he moved to Italy, first as attendant on Cardinal Palotta, then in 1649 in a minor post at the Santa Casa of Loreto, where he died. His principal work was the Steps to the Temple (1646), a collection of religious poems influenced by Marino and the Spanish mystics, which has been acclaimed as the height of baroque in English poetry. To this was attached a secular section, the Delights of the Muses, containing ‘Music's Duel’, a paraphrase of the Latin of Strada, in which nightingale and lute-player contend until the former fails and dies. His best-known poems are those addressed to St Theresa, the ‘Hymne’ and ‘The Flaming Hart’. Both celebrate the bliss of martyrdom in characteristically baroque imagery of doves, darts, hearts, and ‘delicious wounds’. The extravagant conceits of ‘The Weeper’, addressed to Mary Magdalen, were much ridiculed in subsequent periods.

Crashaw, Richard (c.1612–49). Poet. Despite his preacher father's puritan zealotry, Crashaw was drawn increasingly to high Anglicanism, aided by education at strongly Anglo-catholic Peterhouse, Cambridge (fellowship, 1635), preaching at the adjoining Little St Mary's (where he embraced Marianism), and friendship with Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the community at Little Gidding. Fleeing Peterhouse (1643) because of iconoclastic puritans, he made his way to Paris, where, fully converted to catholicism, he was rescued from poverty by fellow-poet Cowley, who had become cipher-secretary to Henrietta Maria in France. The queen's intercessions to Rome led merely to the office of attendant to Cardinal Palotta, before a minor cathedral post at Loreto, where he soon died. Remembered for religious rather than secular verse (Steps to the Temple, 1646), Crashaw was never more than a minor poet despite his richness of language, but his ecstatic mysticism and unrestrained imagery have been acclaimed as the height of baroque in English poetry.

A. S. Hargreaves

Richard Crashaw , 1612?-1649, one of the English metaphysical poets . He was graduated from Cambridge in 1634 and remained there as a fellow at Peterhouse until the Puritan uprising, when he fled to the Continent (1643). Though he was the son of an ardent Puritan clergyman, by 1646 he had converted to Roman Catholicism. He served for several years as an attendant to Cardinal Palotto, who finally procured him a minor post at the shrine of Loreto, Italy, in Apr., 1649. Four months later Crashaw died of a fever. Although he wrote secular poetry in Latin and Greek as well as English, his fame rests on his intense religious poetry. His strange mixture of sensuality and mysticism is unusual in English literature and has been compared to the baroque art of Italy and Spain. The principal volume of his work is Steps to the Temple (1646), enlarged to include Delights of the Muses (1648).

Bibliography: See his complete poems ed. by G. W. Williams (1972).

Crashaw, Richard (c.1613–49), religious poet. The son of a Puritan, he came under High Church influence, and in 1644 he was expelled from a fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, on refusing to subscribe to the National Covenant. He went to France and became a RC. His poetry is filled with a devotion nourished on the Song of Songs and the mysticism of St Teresa.