John Addington Symonds, Blank Verse

John Addington Symonds, Blank Verse, John C. Nimmo, 14 King William Street Strand, London, 1895.

Marlowe … left his own peculiar imprint on it, and that his metre is marked by an almost extravagant exuberance, impetuosity, and height of colouring. It seems to flow from his with the rapidity of improvisation, and to follow a law of melody rather felt than studied by its author.

Shakespeare has more than Marlowe’s versatility and power; but his metre is never so extravagant in its pomp of verbal grandeur. He restrains his own luxuriance, and does not allow himself to be seduced by pleasing sounds. His finest passages owe none of their beauty to alliteration, and yet he knew most exquisitely how to use that meretricious handmaid of melody. Nothing can be more seductive than the charm of repeated liquids and vowels in the following lines:

On such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

Nor again did Shakespeare employ big sounding words so profusely as Marlowe, but reserved them for effects of especial solemnity, as in the speech of Timon:

Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Whom once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover; thither come,
And let my gravestone be your oracle.

But Shakespeare did not always, or indeed often, employ these somewhat obvious artifices of harmonious diction. The characteristic of his verse is that it is naturally, unobtrusively, and enduringly musical. We hardly know why his words are melodious, or what makes them [29] always fresh. (29-30)

Inferior artists have systems of melody, pauses which they repeat, favourite terminations, and accelerations or retardations of the rhythm, prompts them. [30]… Shakespeare’s… power of varying his cadences and suiting them to the dramatic utterance of his characters. (30-1)

Coleridge observes that “Ben Jonson’s blank verse is very masterly and individual.” To this criticism might be added that it is the blank verse of a scholar—pointed, polished, and free from the lyricism of his age. It lacks harmony and is often labored: but vigorous and solid it never fails to be. (32)

Beaumont and Fletcher… in a very short time we discover the trick of these great versifiers and learn to expect their luxurious alliterations, and repeated caesuras at the end of the fifth syllable. … a decided preference for all words in which there is a predominance of liquids and of vowels. For instance, in this line: Showers, hails, shows, frosts, and two-edged winds that prime/ The maiden blossoms, ... (34)

Another peculiarity is the substitution of hendecasyllabic lines for the usual decasyllable blank verse through long periods of dialogue. … It is also noticeable that this weak ending is frequently constructed by the addition of some emphatic monosyllable. Thus:

I do remember him; he was my guardian,
Appointed by the senate to preserve me:
What a full majesty sits his face yet.

Or:

The desolations that this great eclipse works.

The natural consequence of these delays and langours in the rhythm is that the versification of Beaumont and Fletcher has always a meandering and rotary movement. (35)

Marston condensed much thought into his lines…. We find both quaintness of language and roughness of rhythm in these lines; but how weighty … (39)

Facility for expressing every shade of sentiment or reflection in clear and simple lines belonged peculiarly to Decker, Heywood, Middleton, and Rowley, poets who made but little pretension to melodious charms and flowers of fancy [39] …

The same praise belongs to Massinger, who was, indeed, associated with Decker in the production of the play from which these lines are quoted. Coleridge remarks that he has reconciled the language of everyday life with poetical diction more thoroughly than any other writer of dramatic blank verse, and for this reason he recommends him as a better model for young writers than Shakespeare, who is far too individual, and Fletcher, who is too monotonously lyrical. (40)

It has been thought that Ford imitated Shakespeare in his style as much as in the situations of the his dramas. I cannot myself perceive much trace of Shakespeare in the verse of Ford; [42] … The lines are much more broken up than is usual with our dramatists. They sparkle with short sentences and quick successions of reiterated sounds. … This is a sculpted and incisive style. (43)

Webster… His language is remarkably condensed, elliptical, and even crabbed. His verse is broken up into strange blocks and masses, often reading like rhythmical prose. … Yet close analysis will always prove that there was method in the aberrations of Webster, and that he used his metre as the most delicate and responsive instrument… [45] he perfected a style which depends for its effect upon the emphases and pauses of the reciter. One of the most striking lines in his tragedy of the “Duchess of Malfi” proves how boldly and how successfully Webster sacrificed metre to expression. A brother is looking for the first time after death on the form of a sister whom he has caused to be murdered:

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

There is no caesura, no regular flow of verse, in this line, though in point of syllables it is not more redundant that half of Fletcher’s. Each sentence has to be said separately, with long intervals and sighs, that indicate the working of remorseful thought. … in writing it he no doubt imagined his actors declaiming with great variety of intonation, with frequent and lengthy pauses, and with considerable difference in the rapidity of their utterances. (47)

To analyse Miltonic blank verse… paragraphs… In these structures there are many pauses which enable the ear and voice to rest themselves, but none are perfect, none satisfy the want created by the opening hemistich, until the final and deliberate close is reached. Then the sense of harmony is gratified and we proceed with pleasure to a new and different sequence. (57)

Milton… After perusing this quotation, let the reader compared it with Claudio’s speech on Death in “Measure for Measure,” and observe the difference between Shakespearean and Miltonic, between dramatic and epical blank verse. The one is simple in construction and progressive, the other is complex and stationary; but both are musical beyond the possibility of imitation. The one exhibits a thought, in the process of formation, developing itself form the excited fancy of the speaker. The other presents to us an image crystallized and perfect in the poet’s mind; the one is in time, the other in space— (58)

Byron needed rhyme as an assistance to his defective melody. He did not feel that inner music which is the soul of true blank verse and sounding prose. In Keats at last we reach this power. His “Hyperion” is sung, not written, … (64)

Blank verse is better suited for dialogues, descriptions, eloquent appeals, rhetorical declamations, for all those forms of poetry which imply a continuity a development of thought for the setting forth of someone perfect and full-formed idea. The thought or “moment” which is sufficient for a sonnet would seem poor and fragmentary in fourteen lines of blank verse, unless they were distinctly understood to form a part of some continuous poem of dramatic dialogue. When, therefore, blank verse is used lyrically, the poet who manipulates it has to deceive the ear by structures analogous to those of rhymed stanzas. The harmony of our language is such as to admit of exquisite finish in this style; but blank verse sacrifices a portion of its characteristic freedom, and assimilates itself to another type of metrical expression, in the process. (71)

Robert B. Shaw, Blank Verse; A Guide to Its History and Use

Robert B. Shaw, Blank Verse; A Guide to Its History and Use, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2007.

Although exceptions are always possible, it seems likely that blank verse, which can succeed brilliantly in poems of sonnet length or slightly shorter, may find it harder to do so in extremely short pieces (say, under five line). Without room to display many of the devices that, for it, supply distinctive auditory and structural functions, the few lines may seem fragmentary to tentative jottings rather than finished works of art. (9)

Milton’s line, if we come to it after immersion in the relaxed versification of Webster or even the late Shakespeare, is likely to seem metrically austere. Feminine endings are much less frequent than in dramatic verse; (53)

In the early part of the twentieth century, Robert Bridges argued forcefully for the presence in Milton of the kinds of elision described above. … George Saintsbury … argued just as forcefully for Milton’s use of anapests in such instances. … For a reader, thought, it may not matter much whether Milton was unusually adventurous with elision (Bridges) or a pioneer in admitting an occasional anapest into his blank verse (Saintsbury). What we hear in such lines a willingness to play with the possibilities of packing an extra light syllable into a line that in this poet’s practice is usually stricter than that of the dramatists. (57)

Park of what we are calling the conversational effect in Wordsworth relies on an embrace of ordinary vocabulary and an avoidance of the ornate. But in his blank-verse poems a deliberately unshowy approach to the meter may be just as important, though less immediately noticeable. Not to be noticed as meter, in fact, seems to be a primary aim of Wordsworth’s blank verse. (65)
Wordsworth’s willingness to place prepositions like “from” and “to” in stress positions has bothered metrical precisionists. … Those who dislike Wordsworth’s blank verse generally object to what they call its prosiness. Saintsbury (a Shelley devotee) declares that “passage after passage of the Prelude is either intentional burlesque or sheer prose.” The slackness of rhythm, when the language itself is dull, undoubtedly gives such critics of that poem plenty of ammunition. (66-7)

Poetic style often seems to behave like a pendulum. The second generation of romantics, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, all wrote interesting poems in blank verse; but—perhaps fearing the threat of prosiness—they tended to shape their lines in a more formalized manner. (69)

But Tennyson’s distinctive legacy as a verse technician is the more musical blank verse. Indeed, some of his best-known passages in the form are deliberate experiments that bend it in a lyric direction: “Tears, Idle Tears” is often spoken of (and reasonably) as a song. Such passages can of course be gorgeous but compared with Milton and Keats in this regard, their opulent msuci may seem more florid, less suggestive. (78)

The American blank verse was, its relative lack of ornament and its pared-down rhetoric, close also in style to Wordsworth. Coming to it after poets like Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, one is especially struck by the lack of ostentation in its management of sound. William Cullen Bryant… (78)

Frost… lines as regular as these are outnumbered in their respective poems by ones that are less so; and it is rare to find passages much longer than these that do not feature some pronounced variations. (90)

…less-than-studious readers were sometimes under the impression that Frost was writing free verse, which he abhorred. (96)

Justice has identified an undeniably prevalent feature in Stevens’s later approach to (or we might rather say his departure from) blank verse. From his middle period on, numerous lines are provided with an anapestic bounce, or more than one. (156)

It may seem surprising that such leaps in an out of regular meter do not disrupt the reader’s attention more than they do. Probably much of the credit of this is owing to Stevens’s imposingly extended sentences, often overriding the bounds not merely of a few lines but of several tercets. A nagging feeling may eventually accost some readers, a suspicion that the later Stevens is more interested in writing sentences than in shaping lines of verse. This brings us back to the applauding views of Stevens’s prosody that we quoted earlier, perhaps with an additional skepticism both in regard to them and to Stevens. … Donald Justice also writes out of an assumption that Stevens’s changes were positive in their results. He summarizes Stevens’s handling of the blank-verse line as a history of “treating it with ever increasing casualness—the easy condescension of the master—until in the general loosening process both the iambic and pentameter were to become nearly inaudible. (159)

Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw; A Study in Baroque Sensibility

Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw; A Study in Baroque Sensibility, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Books, 1957.

In 1611, William Laud was appointed chaplain to the King; in 1620, he conducted, before King James, the King’s favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, and Buckingham’s mother, his famous conference with the Jesuit, Fisher; thereafter, he became Buckingham’s confessor. The accession of King Charles, amateur theologian and cultivated gentleman, submitted the country to the control of Buckingham and of his confessor, for whom Charles felt a high and constant respect. (5)

During the decade when no Parliament sat, Laud, whose rigor was as sincere as tactless, ruled ecclesiastical affairs. (5)

In 1635 Anthony Stafford published, with the approval of the Primate and Bishop Juxon, The Femall Glory: of, The Life, and Death of our Blessed Lady, the Holy Virgin Mary, God’s Owne Immaculate Mother, one of the most floridly rhetorical productions of the age and one of the most audacious documents of the Anglo-Catholic party. The author addresses his book especially to women: “You who have lived spiritual Amourists, whose spirits have triumphed over the flesh, on whose cheeks Solitude, Prayers, Fasts, and Austerity have left an amiable pale: You who ply your sacred Arithmeticke, and have thouts colde, and cleane as the christall beads you pray by: You who have vow’d Virginity mentall and corporall… Approach with Comfort, and Kneele downe before the Grand White Immaculate Abbesse of your snowy Nunneries, and presente the All-Saving Babe in her arms, with due Venerations.” (9)

The accusations that Laud was an unconfessed Papist had no truth. At least twice offered a cardinalate if he would submit, he refused. (10)

King Charles, reared on the books of Hooker, Andrewes, and Herbert, remained perfectly satisfied with his sacramental Anglicanism, and, though regardful of his wife’s freedom, was eager that his personal attendants should make Anglican communions. (11)

What Catholicly minded Anglicans were most likely to miss, and to seek outside a national church, was provision for the contemplative life. England had—save for Little Gidding, a conventual establishment limited to a single family—no “religious houses.” In developing a devotional literature it was slow… The devout had chiefly to depend, for such aids, upon adaptations of pre-Reformation works like the Imitatio and upon such contraband importations as English versions, printed at Douai or Antwerp for recusant use, of St. Francis of Sales’ Introduction a la Vie Devote and St. Teresa’s autobiography. / In his temperate apologia, publishied in 1647, Serenus Cressy, a convert to Rome who became a Benedictine, made it a chief ground of his defection form the English Church that it did not provide for monks and mystics. Anglicans, he says, “renouncing all Evangelicall Counsills of Perfection, as voluntary poverty, Charity, etc., and their avarice having swallowed all the revenues which nourished men in a solitary life of meditation and contemplation,… (11-12)

Aroused from somnolence by the Reformation, Rome had, with the Council of Trent (1545-63) entered upon her own Renaissance. The new order had its subtractions: the general departure from the Church of the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples left her less catholic in temperamental scope; the presence of doctrinal critics without her borders led her to renounce much of the speculative freedom permissible within an undivided Christendom; there was a marked impulse to emphasize and exalt whatever tenets, practices, and cults had suffered Protestant opprobrium. But with these retrenchments there developed a tighter unity, an inflammation of ardor. /

The most powerful instrument—almost, indeed, the symbol—of this Counter-Reformation was the Society of Jesus, in its foundation almost concurrent with the Council. Everywhere these martially disciplined, indomitable men took command: in education, in learning, in theology, in the conversion of Lutherans and infidels, in the creative arts. Themselves ascetic and scrupulously obedient to the vicar-general and the pope, the Jesuits concealed their iron [13] hand within the softly pliant gauntlets, accommodating themselves, save in matters of de Fide, to the temperaments and manners of the nations among whom they operated; they sought, Christian humanists that they were, to provide frail human nature with amiable incentives to the practice of religion, and, meanwhile, to set heroic standards for the wills of the spiritually ambitious. /

In their acute realism, they saw the importance of controlling education, particularly that of the well-born; … In academies for the laity, the Jesuits excelled at the teaching of rhetoric and the classics, … Learned Jesuits defended the Church against Protestant criticism, … (13-14)

The chief arguments of the Counter-Reformation were its saints, heroes… Though born to wealth and position, Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, founded schools for the poor, sat by the roadside to teach beggars their Pater and Ave, remained by the sick and dying during the great plague. Francis Xavier, winning repute for himself as a professor of philosophy at Paris, became, at the call of St. Ignatius, a Jesuit, labored for twelve years in India and Japan, … “The saints of the Middle Ages performed miracles; the saints of the Counter-Reformation were themselves miracles.” (15)

St. Francis of Sales, fearing that sanctity might be identified with these spectacular gifts, asserted: “There are many Saints in heaven who were never in Extasie, or Rapture of contemplation”… But popular piety, ignorant of these warnings, seized upon raptures and stigmata as the marks of preeminent holiness; and, in the paintings of the seventeenth century, the great saints of recent times, like Saints Ignatius, Philip, and Teresa, were nearly always represented in their moments of vision or rapture. / St. Ignatius and St. Teresa, true Spaniards, united intense practicality with intense mysticism. (16)

…whereas, in the Middle Ages, the martyrs had been depicted triumphant of countenance, they were now represented writhing in the agony… Under the influence of Bernini, whose statue of Alexander VII was immediately felt to be a master work, the skeleton became a familiar equipage of mortuary monuments, while the tense and sometimes agitated effigies of the dead seem remotes from the serene sleep with which the thirteenth century endowed them. The saints, ordinarily visualized by medieval art in the performance of miracles, now appears as recipients of miraculous grace; and the composure of their faces and figures, the tranquil amenity of Raphael’s Virgins, has yielded to the [64] physically contorted pattern of the trance or the rapture. The contraventions of law and reason which Protestantism sought to minimize are everywhere selected for celebration. Common sense and sober judgment, the “wisdom of this world,” are flagrantly violated; and prudence is made to seem a paltry thing in comparison to the extremes, often united, of pain and ecstasy. (64-5)

The baroque style is exuberant, rhetorical, sensual, grandiose. The repose and symmetry of Renaissance art have yielded to agitation, aspiration, ambition, an intense striving to transcend the limits of each genre. Sculpture and architecture would elicit the effects of painting; painting—weary of exact draftsmanship, clearly outlined masses, grouping within the plane, and the architectural fitting of the design to the square or circle of the canvas—would move upward or backward, would anticipate the agility of the cinema, would flow, would disappear into modulated glooms or dissolve into luminosity. In architecture, all is splendor and surprise: (65)

The baroque was the Catholic counterstatement to the reformer’s attacks on the wealth of the Church and her use of painting and sculpture. (65)

Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards the arts differs significantly. The one will have no “graven images” of the supernatural; probably Hebrew in its origin, … The other—more ancient, more indulgent—incorporates elements of Greek polytheism and Platonism; … (66)

…the Jesuits, exponents of the new Catholicism, had dominance; and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the influence of which was, throughout Europe, profound, authorized the “Application of the Senses” to all the themes of religion. (67)

Working verse by verse and stanza by stanza, he rarely envisaged a whole to which the parts should be subordinate. (121)

Crashaw never attempts to translate Marino’s words; instead, he recasts the substance of a passage, transmuting it into a texture which is not only English but Crashavain. (121)

The two illustrious sinner-saints whom Bellarmine cited in his Disputations were St. Peter and St. Mary Magdalen; and both of these became the themes for innumerable poems and paintings. / In the Gospels, the Magdalen is thrice mentioned—as a woman out of whom Christ cast seven devils, as present at the Crucifixion, and as the first to whom the risen Lord appeared; but the Western Church presently identified her with Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and with the unnamed penitent who brought an alabaster box of ointment and, with her tears, washed Christ’s feet, wiping them with her hair. /

French tradition continues the story: After the Ascension, Mary, Matha, Lazarus, and others were set adrift in a boat without sails, oars, or rudder, but, divinely conducted, they made a safe passage to the shores of Provence. Having first converted the pagans of the land by her preaching and her miracles, the Magdalen retired to a grotto in a barren wilderness, penance for her past sins. The angels visits her at the canonical hours, carrying her in their arms to heights from which she could hear the celestial harmonies and see “what eye hath not seen”; and in her solitude, surrounded by angels, she died. /

In the seventeenth century, the Provencal legend was still accepted; and the Magdalen, who has been called the century’s favorite heroine, was generally represented—by painters like Guerchino, Ribera, the Caracci, Rubens, and Van Dyke—in the solitude of her grotto, where, alabaster box in hand, she meditates. She was equally a subject for the Catholic poets, whether they wrote in Latin, Italian, French, or English. (134-5)

As founder and superior of the Discaled Carmelites, she exhibited marked capacities for organization and administration; as ruler of her convent and counselor of her nuns, she was sensible, shrewd, humorous, realistic. … At the bidding of her director, she wrote eight books, of which the most celebrated, The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, … In the most celebrated of her visions, she saw, as she records in her Life, a seraph holding in his hand a fire-tipped dart of gold, which he thrust several times through the heart of the saint. “The paine of it,” she says, “was so excessive, that it forced me to utter those groanes; and the suavity, which that extremitie of paine gave, was also so very excessive, that there was no desiring at all, to be ridd of it…” (140)

In rhyme he preferred the familiar, and the familiar to him, repeated his hearts and darts like so many traditional and dear pieties. Apparently constricted by the planned economy of a stanzaic pattern, he found eventual ease in fluid couplets. (159)

Marc F. Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque

Macr F. Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque, The University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama, 1971.

Even the fiercely anti-Papal William Crashaw (father of Richard Crashaw), who warns the members of the Virginia Company not to suffer Popery in the colonies, complains that the Papists have surely outdone the Protestants in the composing of edifying books of devotion, so much so that it is sometimes necessary to have recourse to these books, which, were it not for their occasional superstitious passages, would be highly commendable. / Especially interesting is the attitude of the Puritan Baxter concerning Catholic devotional works. In Christian Ecclesiastics he considers the problem of Protestants consorting with Roman Catholics. … assures his readers that they may with good conscience read the many sound devotional books and meditation manuals composed by contemporary Papists. He extends the same liberality to Catholic (even Jesuit) theological treatises on noncontroversial matters. Thus we find that among the theological treatises which Baxter recommends to students affluent enough to afford a private library are a treatise by Suarez and one by Ballarmine, both Jesuits. (44)

The Puritans themselves were capable of florid, fiery religious writing. Especially noteworthy is that fascinating man, Francis Rous, a bitter opponent of the Laudian movement, more Calvinistic than Baxter. … In 1635 Rous published his “Mysticall Marriage or Experimental Discourses of the Heavenly Marriage between a Soul and her Savior.” According to Rous the best way to consider the relationship between the soul and Christ her Savior is that provided by the Holy Spirit Himself in the Song of Songs, for “There is a chamber within us, and a bed of love within that chamber wherein Christ meets and rests with the soule.” …this authors is no rejected maverick; he became Speaker of the Barebones Parliament and a leading Cromwellian peer. Much of this devotional tract consists of complicated analogies, … the coupling of a soul and lust like the intercourse of a woman and a hideous beast. … once Provost of Eton, … (50)

Henceforth, let us be wary, all of us, of the term anima naturaliter Catholica, the epithet which Mario Praz has applied to Crashaw, to set him apart from his countrymen. / Mystical fervor, Baroque sensuousness—both are as abundant here as anywhere in Crashaw, and in Rous too we are stuck by the profusion of ravishing ointments, sweet-tasting substances, and “sweet inebriated ecstasies.” No Italian or French devotional tract which I have read surpasses Rous’ in Baroque exuberance or in bold appropriation of the sexual imagery of the Song of Songs,. … a fiery exuberance and even a lusciousness of imagery amazingly akin to that of Counter-Reformation Catholicism are not infrequently encountered among some segments of English Protestants. And it seems safe enough to suggest that the farther left we move from center, the more likely we are to encounter this fervent religion. (51-2)

…Cowley apologized for Crashaw’s conversion to Roman Catholicism but not for his subject matter, much less for his poetic method. No, it is the neo-classical stomach, not the Puritan one, which finds Crashaw indigestible. (53)

It is interesting that those manifestations of the Baroque which to many of us spear grossly sensuous occur far more frequently in prose and poetry of second and especially third rate merit than in those works of the aristocratic tradition with which critics are far more familiar. It is easy to forget, after all, that the poets who have understandably received the lion’s share of critical attention are not necessarily those most widely read by the seventeenth-century public. It seems certain, for instance, that at least ten Englishmen read and enjoyed the enormously popular, often third rate verse of Quarles for every one who read Comus or even the Steps to the Temple. And Quarles abounds in just those manifestations of the Baroque which have alienated many moderns from Crashaw. (53)

It seems, then, that Crashaw’s debt was not exclusively to Marino and the European Baroque poets. He had recourse, as well, perhaps much more extensively, to a native tradition largely eschewed by his contemporaries in the aristocratic tradition. (54)

It is worth pointing out, also, that continental Baroque borrowings were not always Catholic in origin. It would be interesting, for example, to study the influence of the Genevan emblem boks (on eof which was composed by Theodore Beze himself), a remarkable example of the Puritan Baroque. (55)

And anyone widely acquainted with emblem literature smiles at the traditional equation of Latin or Italian with “sensuous” religious. Actually, it is the Northern emblematists, the Dutch and the Germans especially, who developed the sensuous, erotic elements of the Baroque to their highest peak. Divine Love, disguised as Cupid, armed with heart-piercing arrows and jars of irresistible perfumes, was received far more cordially in the homeland of Erasmus than in the land of Dante, a region which, incidentally, He sis not much frequent. And I know of no passage in Marino which approaches the grossness of, let us say, Quarles’ Epigram No. 47. In a word, we have missed the English Baroque. (55)

…Crashaw’s imagery is almost always purely symbolic. The characteristic Crashaw image is not intended to be visualized vividly; the reader is expected, rather, to dwell on the concept embodied therein. Even those imagistic developments usually labeled grotesque are firmly grounded in thought. Crashaw’s emblematic images fall into two categories: the contracted emblem, a single image into which several related thoughts have been tightly packed; and the extended emblem, characterized by a lavish, leisurely imagistic embellishment which is not redundant—as Crashaw’s critics have maintained—but which subtly, yet significantly, advances the developing thought. (118)

The Baroque especially affected certain segments of seventeenth-century Enlgish Puritans, particularly those far left of center (Godwin, Sterry, Rous, for instance). (119)

Keeping in mind the openness of the religious climate, one need not be surprised that St. Francis de Sales exerted a major influence on Crashaw—on his spiritual formation and on the structure of his religious lyrics. St. Francis is responsible for that suave detachment and objectivity which characterize even Crashaw’s most rhapsodic moments, for the startling absence of so many favorite topics of seventeenth-century spirituality—hell, death, sin; and for his celebration of spiritual heroines who surrender their wills completely to the Divine Spouse. Especially influential was the Salesian method of meditation, which forms the substructure of many religious lyrics. Unlike its Ignatian predecessor, the Salesian method does not stress composition of place, application of the senses, introspection, or the arousing of violent emotions. In fact, it rules out the last two. The Salesian method encourages, instead, a calm, leisurely reflection on various “points” (concepts) in as spiritual a manner as possible, to raise the heart up to God in “affective prayer,” the poetic analogue of which is the rhapsodic flight. Crashaw is a poet-meditator of the Salesian school. (120)

Ruth C. Wallerstain, Richard Crashaw; A Study in Style and Poetic Development

Ruth C. Wallerstein, Richard Crashaw; A Study in Style and Poetic Development, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1962.

William Crashaw, an Episcopal clergyman of some note as an anti-Catholic controversialist. (18)

1626… William Crashaw died. The poet had already been deprived in early childhood, first of his mother, the date of whose death we do not know, and then of a loving stepmother, whom William had married in 1619, and who died in childbirth only seventeen months later. In 1629, some three years after his father’s death, Richard Crashaw entered the Charterhouse, from which he passed to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in July. The influence of his father must have been the strongest one in his childhood and early youth. William Crashaw would seem to have been an energetic and passionate man of a somewhat clamorous type. His controversial work betokens zeal for his cause rather than a critical or philosophical temper, … (18)

In memory of the Vertuous and Learned Lady Madre de Teresa was written before the end of 1625, though, as Mr. Austin Warren has shown, Crashaw probably first came to known her in 1638, and that her influence on him was for the remainder of his life an active and immediate one, as is shown not only by the additions to his St. Teresa poems, but by the constant presence in his poetry of the concept of the anguish in the work of St. Teresa that in view of his feeling toward her work it must have come to him from her. (34)

He was especially influenced by Marinism; so to some extent were William Drummond of Hawthornden, Stanley, Sherbourne, and Ayres, while remaining perfectly English. (35)

Before pointing out the notable characteristics of this verse, we may remind ourselves briefly of the special elements in church music which might have influenced it. Three points deserve mention. First, the handling of time was more varied and more free than in later music. That music was unbarred, and changed time with great freedom, and this freedom was extended by the fact that the relation of whole note (breve), half note (semi-breve) and quarter note (minim) to each other was unfixed… Then, a second point, there was more variety in the phrase length. For instance, in Orlando Gibbon’s Anthem, Glorious and Powerful God, there is a passage in which the chorus develops in a double phrase of sixteen bars (when barred in modern notation), divided five plus five and three plus three, as against the eight bar phrases in the declamatory passage. Thirdly, the music was polyphonic. … alliterations which cross form line to line and in doing suggest entirely new line patterns playing across the basic line patterns. This is one of the elements which contribute most strongly to produce a polyphonic effect, especially as it combines with certain variations. (46-7)