“Divine annihilations”: Richard Crashaw’s Religious Politics and the Poetics of Ecstasy

Richard Crashaw has long been read as a Catholic poet, with his poetry placed alongside that of the radical Jesuit priest and martyr, Robert Southwell. Despite the fact that Crashaw took orders in the Church of England (ca. 1635) and, along with George Herbert, shared the "reverent discipline, and religious fear, and soft obedience" characteristic of Nicholas Ferrar's Little Gidding community, Crashaw's conversion to Catholicism (ca. 1645) has contributed significantly to his exclusion from the ambit of Protestant devotional poetry. In examining how the depictions of ecstatic religious experience in his poetry reflect a deep yet subtle political engagement with the religious politics of the 1630s and 1640s, here, Sugimura proposes that Crashaw's poetics of ecstasy allow him to enter the fray of religious controversy while at the same time appearing to stand to the side of it.