Crashaw, Richard (c. 1613-1649)

English religious poet of the metaphysical school. He published a book of Latin sacred epigrams, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (1634). His principal sacred poems were published in Steps to the Temple (1646).

Some secular poems were added to this work under the title Delights of the Muses. Later editions (1648 and 1652) contained additional poems, and others have since been added from manuscript.

Crashaw was born in London and educated at Cambridge University, and he became a fellow of Peterhouse in 1636. In 1644, during the Civil War, he was, in his absence, ejected from Cambridge University by the Parliamentarians. Under the patronage of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria in France, he was converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1646 he moved to Rome, and later became a cleric there.

Crashaw's writing is often impassioned, and the imagery tasteless, but at his best, in poems like The Flaming Heart, he achieves a concrete statement of spiritual experience that places him alongside George Herbert.