Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet whose work, produced largely in the last year of her life, is perhaps most memorable for the disciplined yet fragile verse form she created, the cinquain.
Background
Adelaide Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878 in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Her parents were Algernon Sidney Crapsey and Adelaide (Trowbridge) Crapsey. She was the third child of her parents. Their first child was a son Philip and their second child was a daughter Emily. Adelaide was baptized on November 1, 1878 in Trinity Church in New York City where her father was an assistant minister. Before Adelaide was a year old, her father became the rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Rochester, New York. His family followed him to Rochester from New York City on the canal boat.
Education
After attending Kemper Hall preparatory school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, she entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, from which she graduated in 1901.
Career
Crapsey taught at Kemper Hall in 1902–04 and then spent a year at the School of Classical Studies of the American Academy in Rome. From 1906 to 1908 she taught at Miss Lowe’s School in Stamford, Connecticut, but by the latter year she was in the grip of tuberculosis; for the next three years she sought to restore her health in Italy and England.
During that time Crapsey also carried on the analytic investigations that were to be published, posthumously and uncompleted, as A Study in English Metrics (1918). In 1911 she returned to the United States and took a post as instructor in poetics at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, but in 1913 ill health forced her to enter a sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York. During her last year she wrote much of the verse that was to make her famous. Her deep interest in metre and rhythm led her to devise a new verse form, the cinquain, a 5-line form of 22 syllables that was ideally suited to her own poised, concise, and delicate expression. Analogous to the Japanese verse forms haiku and tanka, it has two syllables in its first and last lines and four, six, and eight in the intervening three lines. It generally has an iambic cadence. In 1915, the year after her death, her own selection of cinquains and verses in other forms appeared as Verses, a volume that was immediately taken up by literati, particularly of the younger generation. Expanded editions in 1922 and 1934 contained some of her earlier and previously unpublished work.
Views
Quotations:
"My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Adelaide's biographer Karen Alkalay-Gut described her life as "constantly hampered by illness, grief, and impecunity." The discrepancy between what she had anticipated doing and what she "actually accomplished was embarrassing to her." The five-line cinquain poetic form she created reflected her life. The first four lines build up "expectancy" only to be followed by a one stress line as an "abbreviated conclusion."
