Crashaw and the Jesuit Poetic

CRASHAW AND THE JESUIT POETIC ANTHONY RASPA The sacred poetry of Richard Crashaw deserves to be compared to the poetry of the Jesuits and studied in the light of Jesuit poetical theory in the Renaissance. There is no other body of pcetry that it so much resembles and no other poetical theory that explains its purposes and techniques so well. In The Poetry of Meditation, Louis Martz pOinted out the great inlluence of the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuits On some of Crashaw's poems and on some of Donne's and Southwell's.' But we must suspect that this inlluence on English poetry is not confined to the structure of individual poems and that it came into it Originally through a poetic theory. As it turns out, this theory was closely allied to the Spiritual Exercises and its rules were adapted to the ends of meditation. There is factual reaSOn for suspecting a strong connection between Crashaw and the Jesuit poetical output in the late sixteenth century and in the first half of the seventeenth. For example, Crashaw translated several Jesuit poems. Some other reasons are less obvious but are more revealing. Crashaw was not so absorbed into the Jesuit poetical tradition that he lost his individuality as a poet, but the characteristics of his sacred poems appear in Jesuit poetry written before and at the same time as his. We may discern three major characteristics in the poetry and poetical theory of the Jesuits in the Renaissance. The first is that the theory was based On the same psychology that underlay the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Order in 1540.' The second is that the Jesuits sought to write in what we may call, for the sake of COnvenience , the epigrammatic style. This style must not be confused with the form of poetry, the epigram. It sought to provoke at the beginning of a long poem the emotional respcnse of the reader normally occurring at the end of the standard short epigram, and to sustain it throughout by a technique of handling metaphors. Thirdly, the Jesuits distinguished rigidly between the genres of sacred and profane poetry. The same three characteristics are discernible in the volume of Crashaw's poems, Carmen Deo Nostro, or A Song to our God (1652). This paper will deal with Volume XXXVI, Number 1, October, 1966 38 ANTHONY RASPA the first characteristic of the Jesuit poetic, the psychology, and with Crashaw's use of it in his sacred poetry. It will become evident in the course of the paper that the epigrammatic style and the division of poetry into the sacred and profane genres rested On this psychology. The three significant figures in the historical background of this poetic in England were, chronologieaJJy, the martyred Jesuit Robert SouthweJJ, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw. Several of SouthweJJ's poems, as we shaJJ see later, depicted in detail the attitudes of the Jesuits to meditation and poetry and the fusion of the two in the meditative poem. In his adult life, John Donne was an ex-Catholic and at times violently antiJesuit , as in his satire Ignatius His Conclave, but several facts testify to his familiarity with Jesuit poetical techniques. Among these are his repeated references in the Conclave to Jesuit poetical theorists, including the German Mathurin Rader or Radier,' and several parodies in the work of the type of Jesuit profane poetry depicting various stages in the Spiritual Exercises (Conclave, 3, 91, 142). We know also that "The first Anniversarie" was based structurally on the rules of the E"ercises and published in the same year as the Conclave, 1611. Of Crashaw's role in the historical background of the Jesuit poetic in England we need mention only the most important facts. As Austin Warren has pointed out, Crashaw found the "real models" for his epigrams, his first volume of verse, "in the Jesuits.'" The volume, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, was published in Cambridge in 1634 when Crashaw was at the most twenty-two. The next fact of interest is that Crashaw translated many Jesuit poems, among them three "Alexias" elegies by Francis Remond; in his edition of Crashaw's works...