Poet, teacher, Anglican cleric and Catholic convert, who was among the major figures associated with the metaphysical poets in seventeenth-century English literature.

"those critics who expressed appreciation for Crashaw's poetry were primarily impressed not with its thought, but with its music and what they called 'tenderness and sweetness of language'".

The son of a violently anti-Catholic deacon, Richard Crashaw was born in London in 1612. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pembroke College at Cambridge in 1634, and the following year produced his first literary work: a volume of translations of Latin verse entitled Epigrammatum Sacroruni Liber. It was around this time that Crashaw`s fascination with Catholicism began to take hold. 

He received a fellowship at Peterhouse college in 1637 and a Masters of Arts degree the following year. He remained there until 1644 when he was forcibly evicted because of his Catholic leanings. Afraid of being imprisoned or even executed on the grounds of heresy, Crashaw fled to France amongst the confusion of the English Civil War where he fully converted to Roman Catholicism. 

In 1646, during his exile, Crashaw`s various poems were anonymously collected and published under the titles Steps to the Temple and The Delights of The Muses, as one volume. It was in this same year that his old college friend Abraham Cowley found him destitute and living in squalor in Paris. Cowley made an entreaty to Queen Henrietta Maria -- a Catholic --, and she in turn secured Crashaw an attendantship to Cardinal Palotta in Rome. 

Although Crashaw had a great personal attachment to the Cardinal, he was so appalled by the excesses and violence of others in his service that he was sent to Loretto in 1650, in an effort to shield him from retaliation (his denunciations of these persons had become, through the years, increasingly more public and biting). He was made a canon of the Holy House there, but in less than three weeks he became gravely ill with fever and died not without grave suspicion of having been poisoned. He was buried in the Lady chapel at Loretto. 

Biography Source: Wikipedia, et al.