Adelaide Crapsey
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet, scholar, and teacher born on September 9, 1878, in Brooklyn Heights, New York. The daughter of an Episcopalian minister, she excelled academically throughout her education, eventually earning a degree from Vassar College in 1901. After periods of teaching literature and history at Kemper Hall and Miss Lowe's preparatory school, Crapsey faced health challenges due to tuberculosis, which would profoundly impact her life and work. She spent time in Europe, studying prosody and engaging with the literary community before returning to the U.S. in 1911 to teach at Smith College.
Crapsey is perhaps best known for inventing the cinquain, a five-line verse form characterized by its specific metrical structure and vivid imagery, drawing connections to the Imagists. Despite her declining health, she produced a significant body of work in a short time, with most of her cinquains written between 1911 and 1913. She passed away on October 8, 1914, but her contributions to poetry, particularly her innovative verse forms, have left a lasting legacy in American literature.
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Adelaide Crapsey
Poet
- Born: September 8, 1878
- Birthplace: Brooklyn Heights, New York
- Died: October 8, 1914
- Place of death: Rochester, New York
Biography
Poet, scholar, and teacher Adelaide Crapsey was born in Brooklyn Heights, New York, on September 9, 1878. She was the third of nine children born to an Episcopalian minister, Reverend Algernon Sidney Crapsey, and his wife, Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey. She attended public school in Rochester from 1884 through 1893 and was an outstanding student. She likewise excelled in her studies at an Episcopal boarding school in Wisconsin, Kemper Hall, which she attended from 1893 to 1897, and at Vassar College, where she enrolled in 1897 and completed an A.B. with honors in 1901.
For a year after graduation, Crapsey remained at home before returning for two years to Kemper Hall, this time as a teacher of literature and history. During this time, she determined that her primary scholarly work would be in English prosody. While in her second year at Kemper Hall, she began to feel the beginning effects of tuberculosis; the disease would not be diagnosed, however, until 1911. In October, 1904, she left for Europe, landing first in Rome. There she worked as a guide and studied at the School of Archaeology for about a year before returning to Rochester in 1905. In 1906, she began work as an instructor of English at Miss Lowe’s preparatory school in Stamford, Connecticut, but by 1908 the effects of her tuberculosis were so debilitating that she gave up teaching and returned to Europe, living for the longest periods of time in Rome, London, and Kent, England.
While continuing her study of prosody at the British Museum, Crapsey was also encouraged by prosodist T. S. Omond to submit her work in metrical studies to the Modern Language Review. No longer able to support herself financially, she returned to America in 1911, taking a teaching position at Smith College. In September, 1913, she entered a sanatorium in New York and, ordered not to further exhaust herself with her metrical studies, devoted herself to writing poetry. She remained at the sanatorium until financial difficulties forced her to return to her family in Rochester in August,1914. She died in Rochester on October 8, 1914.
Although Crapsey believed that her study of poetic meter was her greatest achievement, she is best known for her invention of the cinquain, a compact, tightly restrained verse form similar to the Japanese haiku in its brevity and tension between images of permanence and images of transitoriness. However, the cinquain differs from haiku because it is an accented rather than a syllabic verse form. In addition to her cinquains’ tight structure— five unrhymed lines with one, two, three, four, and one stress, respectively—the poems are noted for Crapsey’s razor-sharp fidelity in natural detail, relating her work to that of the Imagists. Further memorable is the short, almost Keatsian time span in which her body of poetry was written. According to her biographer, Mary Elizabeth Osborn, Crapsey’s first cinquain was written in 1909, though Crapsey herself indicates in her volume of poetry Verse (1915) that all of her cinquains were written between 1911 and 1913.