Mary, but also Teresa and Mary Magdalene, as the embodiment of virtue, purity and salvation. Indeed, Crashaw's three poems in honour of the Saint Teresa of Avila--"A Hymn to Sainte Teresa," "An Apologie for the fore-going Hymne," and "The Flaming Heart" are considered his most sublime works. According to Sabine, "In his finest contemplative verse, he would reach out from the evening stillness of the sanctuary to an embattled world that was deaf to the soothing sound of Jesus, the name which, to his mind, cradled the cosmos."According to Husain, Crashaw is not a mystic—and not by traditional definitions of mysticism—he is simply a devotee who had a mystic temperament because he "often appears to us as an ecstatic poet writing about the mystical experiences of a great saint (St. Teresa) rather than conveying the richness of his own mystical experience". Husain continued to categorise Crashaw's poems into four topic areas: While Crashaw is categorised as one of the metaphysical poets, his poetry differs from those of the other metaphysical poets by its cosmopolitan and continental influences. As a result of this eclectic mix of influences, Sabine states that Crashaw is usually "regarded as the incongruous younger brother of the Metaphysicals who weakens the 'strong line' of their verse or the prodigal son who 'took his journey into a far country', namely the Continent and Catholicism." Lorraine M. Roberts writes Crashaw "happily set out to follow in the steps of George Herbert" with the influence of The Temple (1633), and that "confidence in God's love prevails in his poetry and marks his voice as distinctly different from that of Donne in relation to sin and death and from that of Herbert in his struggle to submit his will to that of God." Critical reception Much of the negative criticism of Crashaw's work stems from an anti-Catholic sentiment in English letters—especially among critics who claim that his verse suffered as a result of his religious conversion. Conversely, the Protestant poet Abraham Cowley memorialised Crashaw in an elegy expresses a conciliatory opinion of Crashaw's Catholic character" Today, Crashaw's work is largely unknown and unread— if he is not the "most important" he is certainly one of the most distinguished of the metaphysical poets. Crashaw's poetry has inspired or directly influenced the work of many poets in his own day, and throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. According to literary scholars Lorraine