Richard Crashaw - Importance and Interpretation

Importance and Interpretation

Crashaw excelled in all manner of graceful accomplishments; besides being an excellent Latinist and Hellenist, he had an intimate knowledge of Italian and Spanish; and his skill in music, painting and engraving was no less admired in his lifetime than his skill in poetry. Cowley memorialized him in an elegy that ranks among the very finest in our language, in which he, a Protestant, well expressed the feeling left on the minds of contemporaries by the character of the young Catholic poet:

"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 poetry of Crashaw will be best appreciated by those who can with most success free themselves from the bondage of a traditional sense of the dignity of language. The custom of his age permitted the use of images and phrases which we now condemn as incongruous and unseemly, and the fervent fancy of Crashaw carried this licence to excess. At the same time his verse is studded with fiery beauties and sudden felicities of language, unsurpassed by any lyricist between his own time and Shelley's.

There is no religious poetry in English so full at once of gross and awkward images and imaginative touches of the most ethereal beauty. The temper of his intellect seems to have been delicate and weak, fiery and uncertain; he has a morbid, almost hysterical, passion about him, even when his ardour is most exquisitely expressed, and his adoring addresses to the saints have an effeminate falsetto that makes their ecstasy almost repulsive. The faults and beauties of his very peculiar style can be studied nowhere to more advantage than in the Hymn to Saint Teresa.

Among the secular poems of Crashaw the best are Music's Duel, which deals with that strife between the musician and the nightingale which has inspired so many poets, and Wishes to his supposed Mistress. In his latest sacred poems, included in the Carmen Deo nostro, sudden and eminent beauties are not wanting, but the mysticism has become more pronounced, and the ecclesiastical mannerism more harsh and repellent. The themes of Crashaw's verses are as distinct as possible from those of Shelley's, but it may, on the whole, be said that at his best moments he reminds the reader more closely of the author of Epipsychidion than of any earlier or later poet.

Crashaw's works were first collected, in one volume, in 1858 by William Barclay Turnbull. In 1872 an edition, in 2 volumes, was printed for private subscription by the Rev. AB Grosart. A complete edition was edited (1904) for the Cambridge University Press as Richard Crashaw: Steps To The Temple Delights of The Muses And Other Poems by A. R. Waller. Crashaw's works are now available online.

Crashaw's Latin poem Bulla ("Bubble") served as the inspiration for Elliott Carter's large orchestral work Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei. His poem "Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice" was set to music by the English composer Gerald Finzi. His poem "Come and let us live" translated from the Latin poet Catullus, was set to music by the English composer Samuel Webbe Jr.