Knowra Richard Crashaw Richard Crashaw Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649) was an English poet and Anglican cleric whose devotional verse joined intense religious feeling with elaborate imagery and Baroque style.
Metaphysical poetry : A seventeenth-century English poetic tradition marked by intellectual argument, striking conceits, and colloquial wit. Crashaw shares its taste for compressed thought and surprising imagery, though his verse is more sensuous.
The Flaming Heart : Richard Crashaw’s poem meditating on a portrait of the mystic Teresa of Ávila and her pierced heart. Its visual conceits make Crashaw’s characteristic fusion of religious ecstasy and ornate imagery especially clear.
Cambridge University : A university in Cambridge, England, founded in the thirteenth century. Crashaw studied and later held a fellowship at Cambridge before losing his position during the Civil War.
Teresa of Ávila : A sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, and reformer canonized as a Catholic saint. Crashaw’s poems repeatedly celebrate Teresa, whose mystical devotion captured his poetic imagination.
Andrew Marvell : An English poet and politician whose verse ranges from metaphysical lyrics to political satire. Marvell’s controlled wit and political range contrast with Crashaw’s ecstatic devotional imagery.
Baroque : An artistic style characterized by movement, dramatic contrast, ornament, and emotional intensity. Its lavish, theatrical qualities help explain the visual abundance of Crashaw’s devotional poems.
A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa : A devotional poem by Richard Crashaw celebrating Teresa of Ávila through extravagant imagery and praise. The poem shows the scale and intensity of Crashaw’s admiration for Teresa.
University of Cambridge fellows : Members of a college’s governing and scholarly community at the University of Cambridge. Crashaw’s fellowship at Peterhouse connected his early career to university teaching and Anglican institutions.
Abraham Cowley : An English poet whose work helped establish the later tradition of metaphysical poetry. Cowley was Crashaw’s contemporary and contributed a prefatory poem to the 1652 edition of his work.
Henry Vaughan : A Welsh metaphysical poet whose religious verse often reflects on childhood, nature, and spiritual restoration. Vaughan offers a different Protestant mode of inward devotion from Crashaw’s Catholic and Baroque poetry.
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