About Richard Crashaw
Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) was an English poet, teacher, and Anglican cleric who was among the major figures associated with the metaphysical poets in seventeenth-century English literature. English religious poet. Expelled from Cambridge by the Puritans, he renounced the Anglican religion to embrace Catholicism. Claiming to be a disciple of George Herbert, he cultivated in The Steps to the Temple a lyrical poetry that moves away from introspective meditation to a more sensitive contemplation. His goal was to lose himself in God. He describes a universe characterized by transubstantiation and metamorphosis. He develops a sensitivity whose fundamental characteristic is the assimilation of suffering to pleasure, in the paroxysm of ecstasy.Crashaw's poetry, although often categorized with those of the contemporary English metaphysical poets, exhibits similarities with the Baroque poets and was influenced in part by the works of Italian and Spanish mystics. It draws parallels between the physical beauties of nature and the spiritual significance of existence. Though his body of work is of uneven quality, 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.
Browse all poems and texts published on Richard Crashaw
And when life's sweet fable ends, Soul and body part like friends; No quarrels, murmurs, no delay; A kiss, a sigh, and so away.
