R. V. Young, Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age

Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, R. V. Young, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1982

A disproportionate attention has been devoted to those poems with clear marks of Marinist or neo-Latin influence at the expense of later and decidedly superior pieces, like the Teresa poems and the various hymns on ecclesiastical feasts. Thus Crashaw’s regrettable fate is to be remembered largely for his most extravagant epigrams and, especially, for “The Weeper,” one of the most Marinistic but least successful efforts. Moreover, the focus on the more superficial and insistent distinctions—the startling conceit, the fusion of wit, piety, and sensuality—has obscured the truly fundamental differences between Crashaw and his English contemporaries.

In seeking to define the difference, it is important that concrete examples be adduced but equally important that “The Weeper” be avoided. The common assumption that this poem is typical of Crashaw (resulting, no doubt, for its irresistible pedagogical usefulness as an example of “baroque excess”) has placed it in the center of most discussions of the poet’s word. 1-2

The speaker in Crashaw’s poems is, in fact, almost always impersonal…When Crashaw addresses someone, Saint Teresa for example, it is almost always in the mode of apostrophe: there is no sense that he is expecting a reply…In short, although he deals with persons, Crashaw does not deal with specifically individual or private experience; and although he is often interested in a particular place, as in the Nativity and Epiphany hymns, he almost never defines a truly dramatic setting. 8-9

Crashaw’s poetry is essentially public: the poet is a participant in a ritual, in a celebration of the Church (Cf. Louis L. Martz, The Paradise Within, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964, pp. 3-3). If the personal note is foremost in Herbert, in Crashaw the essence is impersonality. He is interested in Teresa more as a saintly pattern for the faithful than as an individual: there is nothing “psychological” about his treatment of her raptures. Even the mysticism of the dark night of the soul is characteristically linked by Crashaw to a celebration of a Church feast in the Epiphany hymn. 9

Crashaw writes what then might be called “sacred occasional verse,” but since the “occasions” are not only renewed each year but indeed represent the transfiguration of time by the ingression of eternity, his poems escape the usual limitations of this sort of poetry. Crashaw’s own poems, like the medieval hymns he translated, aspire to be, in spirit if not in fact, a part of the liturgy. /

Plainly the difference between Crashaw and most other English devotional poets is not simply a matter of Marinist or neo-Latin influence. Witty conceits and lush images are not the most important or distinctive features of Crashaw’s poetry; a contrasting popular element of humor, innocence, and childlike wonder pervades his work and is explicitly indicated in the Nativity hymn:

Welcome, though not to those gay flyes.
Guided ith’ Beames of earthly kings;
Slippery soules in smiling eyes;
But to poor Shepheards, home-spun things:
Whose Wealth’s their flock; whose witt, to be
Well read in their simplicity. [ll. 91-96]

If this is not the accent of Herbert, neither is it the exotic sophistication associated with Marino. In any case, the Italianate style was available in England before Crashaw (indeed, before Marino) began to write. As A. Alvarez observes, “The elements of Crashaw’s style are there in Southwell and Giles Fletcher’ he also has qualities in common with Francis Quarles. Yet nobody worries about them.” (The School of Donne, New York, Random House, 1961, p. 100) In other words, elaborate rhetorical artifice is not what sets Crashaw apart. “There would be no difficulty with Crashaw’s poetry,” Alvarez quips, “if it were not as good it is.” (p. 99)

The fundamental incompatibility between Crashaw’s tone and purpose and the work of Marino and the neo-Latinists may be observed in a progressive slackening of their influence in Crashaw’s finest and most mature poetry. Mario Praz’s study of Crashaw and the notes in the editions by George Williams and L. C. Martin cite numerous parallels to the borrowings from Italian and continental Jesuit sources in Crashaw’s epigrams, “The Weeper,” and many of the earlier poems (Mario Praz, “Crashaw and the Baroque Style,” in The Flaming Heart, 1958; rpt. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, 1966, pp. 204-63; L. C. Martin, ed. The Poems English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, 2nd ed., Oxford: Claredon, 1957; and Williams, ed., Complete Poetry.) In addition there are translations of Marino, other Italians, and various neo-Latinists. But when we turn to the sacred poems identified by Martin as among Crashaw’s last compositions, there is a dramatic diminution in these analogues and, in fact, a dramatic change in the character of the poetry:

“The poems which were added to Steps to the Temple in 1648 show that, apart from the continued preoccupations with “divine” subjects and the continued and perhaps increased fostering of an exalted religious sense, Crashaw’s style was now developing away from the clearly apprehended imagery and precise metrical forms of his earliest poetry towards a freer verse and more complex metaphorical utterance, in which the images, as in Shakespeare’s later style, seem to follow each other in quicker successful without always being clearly conceived or fully exploited. “ (Poems English, Latin and Greek, pp. xci-xcii.)

Crashaw’s most astute critics have noticed this change in the character of his work and point out that if it involves a growth beyond Marinism. Even Mario Praz, who was first to stress the Italian influence, gives certain indications that it is an inadequate explanation for many aspects of Crashaw’s poetry. He praises the translation of Sospetto d’Herode at the expense of Marino’s original, commends the naturalness of Crashaw’s conceits in contrast to Marino’s mechanical effects, and finally suggests that similarities between Crashaw and Marino are largely superficial:

It would be unfair to call Crashaw a Marinist just because he was trained to turn surprising concetti in Marino’s school: Crashaw’s poetry, in its more peculiar aspects, is the literary counterpart, though a minor one, to Ruben’s apotheosis, Murillo’s languors and El Greco’s ecstasies. (The Flaming Heart, pp. 233, 248, 252-53. See also Ruth Wallerstein, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development, pp. 35, 53; and Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study, p. 158)

The extent of Marino’s influence on Crashaw and other English writers is also questioned in a major study of the Italian poet. James V. Mirollo observes that, with few exceptions, “similarities of theme or imagery between Crashaw and Marino cannot be safely attributed to the direct influence of the Italian, who in many instances worked with the same materials in Latin and Italian poetry that Crashaw knew.” According to Mirollo, Marino’s general impact has often been exaggerated:

“In truth, the elements of Marino’s verse that appealed to Crashaw were available as early as the poetry of Robert Southwell, whose poem on Saint Peter (1595), translated out of Tansillo’s Lacrime di San Pietro (1585), may be said to mark the arrival in England of the continental neo-Catholic style…if the Marinesque style is to be identified exclusively with post-Tridentine poetry, then we should have to say that it all began before Marino’s output, with those elements of his style which are least original with him, hence the Italian’s influence was important but not crucial.” (The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino [New York: Columbia University Press, 1963], pp. 250-51. Mirollo also point out that “in his relations with Iberian literature Marino was more the borrower than the lender” [p. 265; see also pp. 252-54]. Marino’s “borrowings” from Lope de Vega were first detailed (as Mirollo acknowledges) by Damaso Alonso, “Lope despojado por Marino,” Revista de filologia Espanola, 33, 1949, 110-43. For differing angles on Marino’s relations to Crashaw, see Laura L. Petoello, “A Current Misconception Concerning the Influence of Marino’s Poetry on Crashaw’s,” MLR, 52 [1957], 321-328; and Louis R. Barbato, “Marino, Crashaw, and Sospetto d’Herode,” PQ, 54 [1975], 522-27.)

Crashaw, quite evidently, stands apart from the Metaphysical poets despite obvious affinities of theme and style, but at the same time his peculiarity cannot be accounted for and dismissed by merely referring it to the seductive influence of Marino and neo-Latin rhetoric. It has become commonplace to call Crashaw’s poetry baroque, but very often this is a verbal evasion rather than an explanation. Douglas Bush, for example, calls Crashaw “the one conspicuous English incarnation of ‘baroque sensibility,’” but he proceeds to close and unedifying circle by defining baroque poetry as “poetry like Crashaw’s.” (English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-60, 2nd ed., Oxford: Claredon, 1962, p. 147) Various scholars have drawn illuminating parallels between Crashaw’s verse and baroque music or plastic arts, or Counter-Reformation mystical or liturgical symbolism, but comparisons among the various arts are always vague and full of qualifications. This apparent impasse, which forces us to regard Crashaw’s later poetry as sui generis and utterly remote, is the result of assuming that baroque literature was virtually all written in Italian or Latin and thus ignoring one of the most fertile sources of the European baroque movement: the Spanish siglo de oro or Golden Age. In the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, baroque art, both visual and literary, was nowhere stronger than in Spain; and, of more importance, nowhere were the forces of the Counter Reformation strong er among poetic talents of the first order. It is, then, to Spain that we must turn in seeking to provide a literary home for England’s poetic outcast, in seeking to place Crashaw in context. 9-12

Wellek and Warren issue a stern warning to the scholar who would seek to establish relationships or influence and parallel between specific works of literature:

“Parallel hunting has been widely discredited recently: especially when attempted by an inexperienced student, it runs into obvious dangers. First of all, parallels must be real parallels, not vague similarities assumed to turn, by mere multiplication, into proof. Forty noughts still make nought. Furthermore, parallels must be exclusive parallels; that is, there must be a reasonable certainty attainable only if the investigator has a wide knowledge of literature or if the parallel is a highly intricate pattern rather than an isolated ‘motif’ or word.” (Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed., New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1962, p. 258)

Having asserted this point, however, they then concede the value of the method: “The relationships between two or more works of literature can be discussed profitably only when we see them in their proper place within the scheme of literary development. Relationships between works of art present a critical problem of comparing two wholes, two configurations not to be broken into isolated components except for preliminary study.” It is precisely from a failure to heed this last injunction that Crashaw’s reputation has suffered. Because it is not difficult to locate extravagant conceits in Crashaw, and because there are such conceits in Marino, it has been all too easy to dismiss the English poet as Italianate without ever considering the poetic design which his conceits—and all the other aspects of his poetry—serve. In the light of such observations, it is hardly to the purpose to demonstrate that a given phrase or figure of image in a poem by Crashaw comes not from Marino but rather from, say, Gongora, even if this should prove often enough to be true. 16-17