Richard Crashaw

Richard Crashaw (* 1613 in London , † August 25, 1649 in Loreto , Italy) was an English poet .

Life

Title page of Steps to the Temple by Richard Crashaw, 1646

Richard Crashaw was born in London to a Puritan clergyman and studied at Cambridge University . He left England in 1644, converted to the Roman Catholic Church in France in 1645 and then settled in Italy. He wrote love and religious poetry in a flowery, emotional style. He is considered to be one of the main representatives of metaphysical poetry , but is also regarded as the “most in-English” and most difficult to access among the metaphysical poets of the 17th century.

Crashaw studied theology at Cambridge and in 1634 became a fellow of Peterhouse, a center of the high church faction. In the same year he published a collection of Latin epigrams on spiritual subjects. In 1639 he was called to the pastor of Little St. Mary's and cultivated equally intensive contacts in the friendly Anglican community of Little Gidding. During this time that shaped him, he felt particularly addressed by the beauty and dignity of religious rituals. His conversion to the Roman faith as anima naturaliter catholica followed as a reaction to the purification of several Cambridge churches from the allegedly superstitious picture decorations by a parliamentary commission in the prelude phase of the English civil war in 1643. In Paris, through the mediation of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria , Crashaw received a position in the circle of the cardinal Palotto. After a long stay in Rome, Crashaw was sub-canon of the Cathedral of the Holy House in Loreto in 1649. He died there a short time later.

Poetic work

In his first collection of poems, Steps to the Temple (1646), the title of which alludes to George Herbert's The Temple (1633), Crashaw's poetic style is influenced by the flamboyant Baroque of the Counter Reformation. The elective affinity to Herbert is also evident in Crashaw's passion epigrams with their blood-and-wounds concetti as well as in his well-known long poems The Weeper with its reference to the tears of penance of Magdalena, and The Flaming Heart with its reference to the ecstasy of Saint Teresa . Characteristic of these poems are their virtuoso chains of metaphors and their connection between the erotic and the sacred.

Regardless of his allusions to the religious poetry of Herbert, Crashaw differs considerably from his role model in his religious and aesthetic sensitivity, even if in his baroque- Catholic ideas he pushes for an embodiment or even carnation of the presentation of religious experience. In his poems The Flaming Heart and Hymn to Saint Theresa in particular, he depicts the mystical raptures or raptures of the Spanish Carmelite nun in a sensual, fervent way that makes her the spiritual counterpart of Donne's erotic ecstasy . In comparison, the contemporary erotic poetry of the Cavaliers appears downright meatless.

Crashaw's counter-Reformation sensualization and eroticization of the religious breaks quite radically with contemporary native English traditions. His lyrical work was mainly inspired by the continental European emblem , the neo-Latin poetry of the Jesuits and the Concetti of Giambattista Marino .

Works

• The steps. From the English and with a foreword by F. Löhrer. Friedrich Verlag, Bad Pyrmont 1952.

literature

• Crashaw, Richard . In: John Venn , John Archibald Venn (eds.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 1: From the earliest times to 1751 , volume 1 : Abbas-Cutts . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1922, pp. 413 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Crashaw in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Werner von Koppenfeld: Marvell, Andrew. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , p. 138.
2. ↑ Werner von Koppenfeld: Marvell, Andrew. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , p. 138 f.
3. ↑ Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton. In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history. 4th, extended edition, Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 111 f.