Richard Crashaw
After taking a degree, Crashaw taught as a fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge and began to publish religious poetry that expressed a distinct mystical nature and an ardent Christian faith.
Crashaw became infamous among English Puritans for his use of Christian art to decorate his church, for his devotion to the Virgin Mary, for his use of Catholic vestments, and for many other reasons.
When Puritan General Oliver Cromwell seized control of the city in 1643, Crashaw was ejected from his parish and fellowship and became a refugee, first in France and then in the Papal States.
In April 1649, Cardinal Pallotta appointed Crashaw to a minor benefice as canon of the Shrine of the Holy House at Loreto where he died suddenly four months later.
[1] His work is said to be marked by a focus toward "love with the smaller graces of life and the profounder truths of religion, while he seems forever preoccupied with the secret architecture of things".
[7] According to Cornelius Clifford, William Crashaw was "a man of unchallenged repute for learning in his day, an argumentative but eloquent preacher, strong in his Protestantism, and fierce in his denunciation of 'Romish falsifications' and 'besotted Jesuitries'".
He required his students to write epigrams and verse in Greek and Latin based on the Epistle and Gospel readings from the day's chapel services.
Laud, with the support of King Charles I, had reoriented the practices of the Church of England with a programme of reforms that sought "beauty in holiness".
[14] Peterhouse's Master, John Cosin, and many of the college's Fellows, adhered to Laudianism and embraced the Anglican tradition's Catholic heritage.
These changes included holding late-night prayer vigils, and adorning the chapel with relics, crucifixes, and images of Mary, mother of Jesus.
In 1641, Crashaw was cited for Mariolatry (excessive devotion to the Virgin Mary) and for his superstitious practices of "diverse bowings, cringeings" and incensing before the altar".
Soon after Crashaw left Cambridge, St Mary's was ransacked on 29 and 30 December 1643 by William Dowsing under orders from the Parliamentarian commanders.
Dowsing recording that at Little St Mary's "we brake downe 60 superstitious pictures, some popes, and crucifixes, and God the Father sitting in a chayer, and holding a globe in his hand".
Several of these poems Crashaw later collected in a series titled Steps to the Temple and The Delights of the Muses by an anonymous friend and published in one volume in 1646.
In his preface, the collection's anonymous editor described the poems as having the potential to induce a considerable effect on the reader—it would "lift thee Reader, some yards above the ground.
According to the Athanae Oxoniensis (1692), antiquarian Anthony à Wood explains the reasoning for Crashaw's conversion as the result of fearing the destruction of his beloved religion by the Puritans: "an infallible foresight that the Church of England would be quite ruined by the unlimited fury of the Presbyterians".
Cowley sought help from English Queen Henrietta Maria, herself in exile in France, to help Crashaw secure a position in Rome.
[23] After repeated lobbying by the Queen, Innocent X finally granted Crashaw in 1647 a post with Cardinal Giovanni Battista Maria Pallotta, who was closely associated with the English College, a seminary in Rome.
[25] In April 1649, Pallotta found a cathedral benefice for Crashaw at the Basilica della Santa Casa at Loreto, Marche.
For his first collection of poems, Crashaw turned to the epigrams composed during his schooling, assembling these efforts to form the core of his first book, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (trans.
According to literary historian Maureen Sabine, his poems "reveal new springs of tenderness as he became absorbed in a Laudian theology of love, in the religious philanthropy practiced by his Pembroke master, Benjamin Laney, and preached by his tutor, John Tournay, and in the passionate poetic study of the Virgin Mother and Christ Child".
[14] Sabine asserts that as a result of his Marian devotion and Catholic sensibilities, "In expressing his Christian love for all men, even the archenemy of his father and most English Protestants, Crashaw began to feel what it was like for Christ to be a stranger in his own land.
According to Sabine, "In his finest contemplative verse, he would reach out from the evening stillness of the sanctuary to an embattled world that was deaf to the soothing sound of Jesus, the name which, to his mind, cradled the cosmos.
As a result of this eclectic mix of influences, Sabine states that Crashaw is usually "regarded as the incongruous younger brother of the Metaphysicals who weakens the 'strong line' of their verse or the prodigal son who 'took his journey into a far country', namely the Continent and Catholicism.
[2] Crashaw's poetry has inspired or directly influenced the work of many poets in his own day, and throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
According to literary scholars Lorraine Roberts and John Roberts, "those critics who expressed appreciation for Crashaw's poetry were primarily impressed not with its thought, but with its music and what they called 'tenderness and sweetness of language'"—including a roster of writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Amy Lowell, and A. Bronson Alcott.
[36][37] "His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right: And I, myself, a Catholic will be, So far at least, dear saint, to pray to thee" The Crashaw prize for poetry is awarded by Salt Publishing.
Elliott Carter (1908–2012) was inspired by Crashaw's Latin poem "Bulla" ("Bubble") to compose his three-movement orchestral work Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei (1993–1996).
"Come and let us live", a translation by Crashaw of a poem by Roman poet Catullus (84–54 BC), was set to music as a four-part choral glee by Samuel Webbe, Jr. (1770–1843).
