The English Poems of Richard Crashaw

Important for seventeenth-century English literary studies, this first scholarly edition of Crashaw's verse since George Walton Williams's Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw (1970) revivifies his unfortunately neglected metaphysical poetry for the twenty-first century.Though Crashaw occasioned some panic among the Anglo-American literary academy in the past century, the grounds on which he was then marginalized, as his new editor Richard Rambuss argues, now seem narrow-minded, arbitrary, and dated.This poet needs serious and sympathetic revaluation which Rambuss greatly facilitates.Crashaw wrote Latin as well as English poetry.Aside from an early volume of Latin poetry on sacred themes (1634), in Crashaw's own time his verse was published in three overlapping collections, mainly in English but also in Latin: Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with Other Delights of the Muses (London, 1646); an eponymous revised and expanded second edition (London, 1648); and a Catholicized repackaging of Steps to the Temple's sacred verse, Carmen Deo Nostro (Paris, 1652), newly illustrated with twelve engravings (including two often attributed to Crashaw himself).He was apparently unable to supervise these editions, for he had fled to the Continent around 1644 to avoid Puritan religious persecution, and died in 1649.Rambuss's edition focuses on the English verse from both the 1646 and 1652 volumes; the latter presents its poems largely as they appear in the revised Steps of 1648, but with numerous significant variants.Rambuss further includes Crashaw's English poems that uniquely appear in the 1648 edition, his English verse appearing only in manuscript, and a 1653 edition of his poem Letter […] to the Countess of Denbigh, which revises the version in Carmen Deo Nostro.In reproducing the English poems of the 1646 and 1652 volumes, Rambuss restores their original order abandoned in Williams's 1970 edition.Thus we may consider the significances that order may have had for the poet or his publishers, and for the readers of his time.This edition aptly juxtaposes the 1646 and 1652 volumes: the former presents the poet as a Laudian Anglican within the Church of England, as does its 1648 successor; the latter, as a Roman Catholic following his conversion on the Continent around 1645.

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