Richard Crashaw (c. 1613 – 21 August 1649), was an English poet, styled "the divine," and known as one of the central figures associated with the Metaphysical poets in 17th Century English literature. The son of a prominent Puritan priest, Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. After taking a degree, Crashaw began to publish religious poetry and to teach at Cambridge. However, his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism during the English Civil War and at a time of great hostilities between the two Christian denominations, led to his ouster from Cambridge and forced him into exile.
Crashaw's poetry is firmly within the Metaphysical tradition. Though his oeuvre is considered of uneven quality and among the weakest examples of the genre, 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."
Read more about Richard Crashaw: Life, Importance and Interpretation, Works
Famous quotes containing the word crashaw:
“O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large then they;
By all thy brim-fill’d Bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seiz’d thy parting Soul, and seal’d thee his;”
—Richard Crashaw (1613?–1649)