Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano, Ofili

I.

Richard Crashaw's place within the canons of taste, to the extent that he still retains one, is as an author critics have loved to hate. In his own time, however, this seventeenth-century metaphysical poet was (apart from the ire of some radical Puritan iconoclasts) mostly well regarded. In the succeeding centuries, as we shall see, the critical estimation of Crashaw turns wildly various. But then even the poet's detractors tend to deem him one of the most ingenious of the metaphysicals: that is, one of the most metaphysical of the metaphysicals, a group of writers known for their startling poetic conceits and their flair for juxtaposing seemingly discordant domains of meaning to acute sensate effect. The late-Victorian poet and essayist Francis Thompson thus declares that Crashaw (and not John Donne) stands as "the highest product of the Metaphysical School."¹ Although now little read and even less taught, Crashaw was also not without his modern admirers. Notable among them was William Empson, whose Seven Types of Ambiguity selects passages from Crashaw's sacred epigrams and hymns as representative of its seventh and ultimate form of ambiguity, whereby opposed affective reactions are simultaneously triggered by the same passage of text or image.² T. S. Eliot, whose critical protocols and cultural investments could hardly be more different from Empson's, also writes admiringly of Crashaw, placing him, along with Donne, at the center of his account of the expressive workings of the metaphysical style.³ But in differentiating Crashaw from Donne, Eliot also influentially emphasizes what he sees as the Roman Catholic and Continental features of Crashaw's work, determining that "[h]ad he lived today he could only have dwelt in Florence or in Rome." Remarkably, Eliot goes so far as to hail this English metaphysical as the greatest baroque poet of all, as "more baroque than the baroque."⁴

Crashaw regularly serves as an exemplary poet, no matter that what he is shown to be a prime example of has varied dramatically. Indeed, it is the other line of Crashaw criticism—the more pronouncedly phobic one—that will be my first concern here, in an essay whose ultimate subject is aversion for religious representations in the metaphysical mode, both early modern and postmodern. Crashaw criticism is an annals of such distaste. In it, we find his poetry (or at least certain notorious passages) adduced as a benchmark of bad taste and indecorum. Crashaw serves as the signal illustration of metaphysical excess, particularly as it took up with what is seen to be a too sensuous, too erotic mode of religious devotion, "a kind of introversion of the sensual into the spiritual," as one critic would disapprovingly put it.⁵ Readers have thus been affronted by Crashaw's "spiritualized voluptuousness" and "his hysterical intensity"; by his incorrigible conceit-making, which has been branded as "intolerable," "silly," and "excruciatingly insistent"; by "the utterness of his sentiment, the intensity of his emotion, the cheap glitter of his diction."⁶

Although Eliot apparently found something to relish in Crashaw's Catholic bent, critics have more typically seen this poet's religious apostasy as of a piece with his aesthetic improprieties. "If [George] Herbert with his restrained passion represents the spirit of the Anglican communion," notes one Victorian miscellany of sacred verse, "Crashaw with his fervor and want of taste may well stand for Rome."⁷ William Hazlitt paradoxically describes Crashaw as a religious poet "without much religion," one who nonetheless—or just so—becomes "fascinated by the glittering bait of Popery."⁸ Crashaw, for Hazlitt, is "a hectic enthusiast in religion and in poetry, and erroneous in both."⁹ Even A. C. Swinburne, whose own decadent writings have more than once drawn comparison to Crashavian excess, finds this poetry "steeped in Catholic sentiment and deformed by fantastic devotion."¹⁰ Henry Southern, writing in the inaugural issue of The Retrospective Review, an early nineteenth-century periodical devoted...