An English poet and lyricist with profoundly High Church beliefs, Crashaw was forced to flee to the continent after the rise of the seventeenth-century Puritan government, converting to Catholicism in 1645. He lived first in France, then Italy. He was best known for a collection of primarily mystical religious poems, Steps to the Temple. Sacred Poems, With other Delights of the Muses (1646) and the posthumously-published Carmen Deo Nostro (1652). By the nineteenth century he was admired primarily for the musicality of his verse and the delicacy of his language, and some of his work has inspired or been set to music.