The poetry of tears and the metaphysics of grief: Richard Crashaw's “The Weeper”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Milton and Shakespeare participated in the desacralization of Catholic tear poetry, Richard Crashaw sought to further its Counter-Reformation. His 1648 work, “The Weeper,” has long been recognized as developing the poetic conventions of Southwell's St Peters Complaint , Giambattista Marino's “La Maddalena di Tiziano,” and other poems in the Catholic tradition that were popular in both Laudian and Tridentine Counter-Reformations. What critics have not recognized, however, is that “The Weeper” participates in a literary agon over the theology of poetic tears: just as Milton's Paradise Lost inverts the conventions of the Ignatian “Exclamation of wonder,” so George Herbert's Calvinist poem “Grief” – to which “The Weeper” is a kind of Counter-Reformation response – parodies the Southwellian tradition by refuting its ability to express a genuinely contrite experience of godly sorrow. In “Grief,” Herbert disavows the formality of Catholic tear poetry as a means of conveying the authenticity of devout sorrow, thereby offering a Protestant critique of the genre. Crashaw responds to Herbert's Calvinist poem by translating “Grief” from the private, meditative context of solitary prayer and into the public, liturgical space of Eucharistic worship. In the process, “The Weeper” turns away from Herbert's Calvinist poetics, in which the medium is not the message, developing, in its place, a more deeply sacramental poetic predicated on the ideal of linguistic isomorphism – the Eucharistic conjoining of word and thing. Crashaw's “The Weeper” also differs from Herbert's “Marie Magdalene” in revealing ways.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".