Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) was an American poet. Born in Brooklyn, New York, September 9, 1878, she was raised in Rochester, New York, daughter of Episcopal minister Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who had been transferred to upstate New York.

Related Topics:
Brooklyn - September 9 - 1878 - Rochester, New York

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She attended public school in Rochester, and then Kemper Hall, a girls' preparatory school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before entering Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, graduating in 1901.

Related Topics:
Kemper Hall - Vassar College - Poughkeepsie

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That same year her sister Emily died, and Adelaide delayed starting her teaching career for a year. In 1902 she took a position at Kemper Hall, where she taught until 1904. She then spent a year at the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome.

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In the years before he death, she wrote much of the verse on which her reputation rests. Her interest in rhythm and meter led her to create a varation on the cinquain (or quintain), a 5-line form of 22 syllables influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka. Her cinquain has a generally iambic meter and consists of 2 syllables in the first and last lines and 4, 6 and 8 syllables in the middle three lines.

Related Topics:
Cinquain - Haiku - Tanka

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Crapsey died of tuberculosis in Rochester on October 8, 1914. The following year Claude Bragdon published Verses, a posthumous selection of her cinquains and other verse forms. Revised editions were published in 1922 and 1934 and contain earlier unpublished work. Also published posthumously in 1918 was the unfinished A Study in English Metrics, a work she began during a 3-year stay in Europe while trying to recover from the illness that was eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis.

Related Topics:
October 8 - 1914 - Claude Bragdon

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She is buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, and her work is housed at the University of Rochester Library archives.

Related Topics:
Mt. Hope Cemetery - University of Rochester

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Carl Sandburg was partly responsible for the continued interest in the cinquain and in keeping Crapsey from osbscurity through his poem "Adelaide Crapsey".

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