The English Poems of Richard Crashaw by Richard Crashaw (review)

Finally. A modern edition of Richard Crashaw’s verse. Richard Rambuss has given those of us who work on Crashaw that for which we have long pined: a critical edition that allows those unfamiliar with the author’s work, including students, to see his volumes’ original seventeenth-century sequence and organization. This has always been the chief problem with the most recent edition, George Walton Williams’ The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw (1972). Its disarticulated structure—which groups poems according to language, number of versions, whether they are translations, and whether they are sacred or secular—requires that readers already know the layout of the 1646 Steps to the Temple (and probably the 1648) and the 1652 Carmen Deo Nostro in order to reverse-engineer an early modern reading experience. In addition, the structure of the Williams edition has contributed to the critical denigration of Crashaw as alien or un-English, a sentiment that Rambuss carefully rebuffs in his introduction. Restoring the original sequence is especially important for Carmen Deo Nostro given its indebtedness to liturgy, as Rambuss notes. His edition has the added benefit of allowing us to recognize shifts in Crashaw’s own generic proclivities, especially the transition from epigram in Steps to the Temple to hymns and odes in Carmen Deo Nostro. In short, in addition to being out of print, the Williams edition’s organization makes it very difficult to use if one is not already familiar with Crashaw’s work. Thus, it is well-nigh impossible to use it as a teaching text. Rambuss is to be commended for remedying this defect and, moreover, for doing so with a decidedly affordable edition.

Preserving the organization of the 1646 Steps to the Temple and the 1652 Carmen Deo Nostro is, then, the most striking change from Williams’s edition and it leads to some important insights. Most notable is the comparison that Rambuss draws in the introduction between Crashaw’s 1646 volume and Milton’s 1645 Poems, both published by Humphrey Moseley: “Indeed with respect to genre—hymn, ode, metrical psalm, paraphrase, epigram, epitaph—Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple has more in common with Milton’s Poems (1645) than it does with Herbert’s The Temple” (xxxv). In addition, both Milton and Crashaw populate their volumes with occasional devotional material—poems on Christmas, the circumcision on New Year’s Day, and the Passion. Rambuss’s comments in this respect, and throughout the introduction, are in keeping with recent scholarship that questions the preeminence that we often grant to confessional allegiance in our discussions of the act and experience of devotion. Such a focus, Rambuss maintains, leads us to treat Crashaw’s conversion to Roman Catholicism as the telos toward which all of his poetry tends, so much so that we read him “as being a Catholic even before he himself decided to become one” (xix).

The introduction emphasizes Crashaw’s participation in an English poetic and devotional tradition, but it also smartly queries some of our prevailing assumptions about the author’s relationship to Herbert. Rambuss briefly reviews differences between the 1670 and 1648 frontispieces to Steps to the Temple, noting that the earlier volume may not be quite as deferential to The Temple as we have often assumed. Rambuss is never tendentious in the introduction, but his brief reading of these frontispieces and the anonymous “Preface to the Reader” hints at some important reconsiderations of the relationship between the two poets. I offer here just one example: is the phrase “steps to the temple,” unlike “the shadow of the temple” (as in Christopher Harvey’s The Synagogue; or, The Shadow of the Temple [1640]), a tacit suggestion that there’s something impractical, even monumentally forbidding, about The Temple—that one needs pedagogical steps to get there?

Such suggestions for future reexamination and research also serve as the primary...