page_title: Richard Crashaw
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Crashaw / Poetry / Themes
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of Richard Crashaw's poetry collection Steps to the Temple. Sacred Poems, With other Delights of the Muses (London: Printed by T. W. for Humphrey Moseley, 1646). Image located at: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/herbert-influence Other information cropped from the original image on http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/herbert-influence in order to render a two-dimensional work.
context_page_description: Richard Crashaw, was an English poet, teacher, High Church Anglican cleric and Roman Catholic convert, who was among the major figures associated with the metaphysical poets in seventeenth-century English literature.
  Crashaw was the son of a famous Anglican divine with Puritan beliefs who earned a reputation as a hard-hitting pamphleteer and polemicist against Catholicism. After his father's death, Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse School and Pembroke College, Cambridge. 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 was ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England and in his theology and practice embraced the High Church ritual reforms enacted by Archbishop Laud. Rev. Crashaw became infamous among English Puritans for his use of religious art to decorate his church, for his devotion to the Virgin Mary, for his use of Catholic vestments, and
  for many other reasons. During these years, however, the University of Cambridge was a hotbed for such practices and for Royalist politics.
context_section_description: Crashaw's work has as its focus the devotional pursuit of divine love.  According to 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". 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." He depicts women, most notably the Virgin Mary, but also Teresa of Ávila and Mary Magdalene, as the embodiment of virtue, purity and salvation. Indeed, Crashaw's three poems in honour of the mystical Saint Teresa of Avila--"A Hymn to Sainte Teresa," "An Apologie for the fore-going Hymne," and "The Flaming Heart" are considered his most sublime works.
  According to Maureen 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."
  According to Husain, Crashaw is not a mystic—and not by traditional definitions of mysticism—he is simply a devotee who had a mystic temperament because he "often appears to us as an ecstatic poet writing about the mystical experiences of a great saint (St. Teresa) rather than conveying the richness of his own mystical experience". Husain continued to categorise Crashaw's poems into four topic areas: 
  (1) poems on Christ's life and His miracles;
  (2) poems on the Catholic Church and its ceremonies;
  (3) poems on the saints and martyrs of the Church; and
  (4) poems on several sacred themes such as the translation of the Psalms, and letters to the Countess of Denbigh, and "On Mr. George Herbert's book intituled, The Temple of Sacred Poems sent to a Gentlewoman," which contain Crashaw's reflections on the problem of conversion and on the efficacy of prayer."
  While Crashaw is categorised as one of the metaphysical poets, his poetry differs from those of the other metaphysical poets by its cosmopolitan and continental influences. As a result of this eclectic mix of influences, literary scholar Maureen 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." Lorraine M. Roberts writes Crashaw "happily set out to follow in the steps of George Herbert" with the influence of The Temple (1633), and that "confidence in God's love prevails in his poetry and marks his voice as distinctly different from that of Donne in relation to sin and death and from that of Herbert in his struggle to submit his will to that of God."
caption: Title page of Crashaw's Steps to the Temple (1646) which was published during Crashaw's exile
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