Richard Crashaw

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.

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