The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume IICrashaw, Richard
General
The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume II
Crashaw, Richard
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700
And then as never-to-be-forgotten 'glory' of the Hymn to Teresa, he
adds: 'these verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the
second part of the Christabel; if indeed, by some subtle process of the
mind, they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem'
(Letters and Conversations, 1836, i. 196). Coleridge makes another
critical remark which it may be worth while to adduce and perhaps
qualify. 'Poetry as regards small Poets may be said to be, in a certain
sense, conventional in its accidents and in its illustrations. Thus
[even] Crashaw uses an image "as sugar melts in tea away;" which
although _proper then_ and _true now_, was in bad taste at that time
equally with the present. In Shakespeare, in Chaucer, there was nothing
of this' (as before). The great Critic forgot that 'sugar' and 'tea'
were not vulgarised by familiarity when Crashaw wrote, that the wonder
and romance of their gift from the East still lay around them, and that
their use was select, not common. Thus later I explain Milton's
homeliness of allusion, as in the word 'breakfast,' and 'fell to,' and
the like; words and places and things that have long been not prosaic
simply, but demeaned and for ever unpoetised. I am not at all careful to
defend the 'sugar' and 'tea' metaphor; but it, I think, belongs also to
his imaginative-sensuousness, whereby orient awfulness almost, magnified
and dignified it to him.
Moreover the canon in 'Antiphon' is sound: 'When we come, in the
writings of one who has revealed master-dom, upon any passage that seems
commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true, the part of
wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is that the
barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the result of
sight--the thing to be seen, and the eye to see it. No doubt the
expression may be inadequate; but if we can compensate the deficiency by
adding more vision, so much the better for us' (p. 243).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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