By Joseph Pearce
Crisis Magazine
August 26, 2025
Were one to conduct a survey of modern-day Americans, taken at random, it is likely that not one in a hundred would have heard of the poet Richard Crashaw. Were one to cross the Atlantic and conduct a similar experiment with modern-day Englishmen, it is likely that the result would be the same. This neglect and ignorance of one of England's greatest poets says more about the barbarism of the age in which we live than it does about the merits of the neglected poet.
Richard Crashaw (1613-49) was one of the greatest poets of his age, or indeed of any age. He is one of what might be called the magnificent seven of 17th-century poets (not to be confused with the "secret seven" poets whom we discussed earlier), the other six being Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Dryden.
Although every member of this "magnificent seven" deserves recognition as a great poet, most of them do not deserve recognition as heroes of Christendom, either sung or unsung. Let's consider them individually.
Shakespeare qualifies most emphatically as an unsung hero and has already been the subject of an essay in this series; Ben Jonson converted, possibly under Shakespeare's influence, but then apostatized; John Donne was raised Catholic and was related to the martyr St. Thomas More but became antagonistic to the faith of his fathers; George Herbert, a minister of the Church of England, never seems to have contemplated conversion; and John Milton was virulently anti-Catholic. By contrast, the final member, John Dryden, was a convert to the Faith who should also be numbered among our unsung heroes. More on him presently, but let's return to Crashaw.
Richard Crashaw was the son of the puritan clergyman and preacher William Crashaw, who had fulminated against Shakespeare and the theatre. In a sermon delivered in London in 1608, he had condemned "ungodly plays" for being
a bastard of Babylon [a derogatory synonym for Rome in puritanical Biblespeak], a daughter of error and confusion; a hellish device-the devil's own recreation to mock at holy things-by him delivered to the heathen and by them to the Papists, and from them to us.
These words encapsulate the iconoclastic spirit of puritanism, reflecting the puritan disdain for Western civilization. In one terse, bombastic sentence, the entire legacy of the West is dismissed as being a contagious disease, passed from the devil to the "heathen" Greeks and Romans, and then to the "papist" Catholics until finally, via Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, it had contaminated modern England. It is no surprise that the puritans would shut down the theaters after they seized power following the English Civil War, as well as banning "papist" feasts, such as Christmas and Easter.
In February 1610, two years after the sermon in London, William Crashaw was warning the Lord Governor of Virginia of the greatest threat to the newly founded colony: "We confess this action hath three great enemies: but who be they? even the Devil, Papists, and Players."
Ironically, William Crashaw's son, Richard, born three years after these splenetic words were spoken, would become a Catholic, converting during the Civil War and being forced into exile in consequence. Living in abject poverty in Paris and then in Rome, he was eventually appointed, in April 1649, to the post of subcanon of the Shrine of Loreto in Italy, dying only four months later. A devotee of St. Teresa of Avila, he is a poet of the stature of the great St. John of the Cross, that other great poet and follower of St. Teresa who also suffered greatly for the Faith.
Apart from the many poems written in his native tongue, Crashaw published a noted volume of Latin verse, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, which contains the sublime line on the miracle at Cana: Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit ("the modest water saw its God and blushed"). He is best known, however, for the two poems inspired by St. Teresa of Avila, "A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa" and "Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa," the latter of which is quite simply one of the most beautiful prayers ever written. As for the self-sacrificial spirit that pervades his work as it pervaded his life, it is encompassed in his personal motto:
Live Jesus, Live, and let it be
My life to die, for love of thee.
One of the finest tributes to Richard Crashaw was paid by that fine literary scholar R.V. Young. Writing in the St. Austin Review, Young lauded Crashaw's "meekness in persecution and his patience in suffering" and emphasized his "continuing significance for twenty-first century Catholics and the abiding power of his poetic vision":
As a man, he is a model of fidelity under circumstances when adherence to the Catholic Faith put him in conflict with both his family traditions and wider English society and left him in great uncertainty as to his future in the world. In his poetry, he offers breathtaking depictions of the joy of union with Christ without neglecting the cost in earthly suffering or the doctrinal meaning of devotional experience.
Having allowed this finest of scholars to wax lyrical on this finest of poets, let's conclude by turning our attention, albeit all too briefly, to the final member of the "magnificent seven" to warrant a place among the unsung heroes. This is John Dryden (1631-1700), whose greatest work, The Hind and the Panther, published in 1687, two years after his conversion to Catholicism, is a monumental apologia for the Catholic Faith and an equally monumental rebuttal of the claims of Anglicanism.
Like Crashaw, Dryden suffered persecution for his fidelity to the Faith and, like Crashaw, he is a true literary giant whose neglect by the modern world is scandalous. He deserves, like Crashaw, to become much better known. Perhaps in healthier and happy times this dynamic duo, part of the magnificent seven, will rise from the ashes of present neglect like a phoenix of faith, resurrected and born again within the hearts of new generations of civilized readers.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.