Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey
Adelaide Crapsey
Born	1878 Brooklyn, New York, United States
Died	October 8, 1914 (aged 36) Rochester, New York, United States
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	American

Adelaide Crapsey (September 9, 1878–October 8, 1914), was an American poet. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she was raised in Rochester, New York, daughter of Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who had been transferred from New York City to Rochester, and Adelaide T. Crapsey.

Life

She attended public school in Rochester, and then Kemper Hall, an Episcopal girls' preparatory school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before entering Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she was class poet for three years and editor-in-chief of the Vassarion in 1901, the year she graduated.^[1][2]

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 and taught for two years at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts.

Crapsey was in poor health starting in 1908, following her eldest brother's death in May 1907, and her father's trial for heresy in 1906, after which he was dismissed from the ministry. In 1911, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she withheld the news from her family and continued to teach at Smith until she collapsed in the summer of 1913. She then moved to a private cure cottage in Saranac Lake, New York, where she stayed for a year. In August, 1914, Crapsey returned to Rochester, where she died on October 8, 1914, at the age of 36. ^[2]

In the years before her death, she wrote much of the verse on which her reputation rests. Her interest in rhythm and meter led her to create a variation 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, as shown in the poem Niagara^[3]. Adelaide Crapsey also formulated the established epigram into a new form of couplet^[4], a poem of two rhyming lines of ten syllables with an integral title. An example of this grammatical poem is her 'On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees'.

The year following her death, 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 her three-year stay in Europe.

She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, and her papers are at the University of Rochester Library archives.^[5]

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

Works

Poetry

• A study in English metrics. A.A. Knopf. 1918. http://books.google.com/books?id=4RAFAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Adelaide+inauthor:Crapsey&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_brr=0. 
• Verse. A. A. Knopf. 1922. http://books.google.com/books?id=87YCAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Adelaide+inauthor:Crapsey&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_brr=0. 
• Susan Sutton Smith, ed (9780873953436). The complete poems and collected letters of Adelaide Crapsey. State University of New York Press. 

Anthologies

• Marjorie Barrows, Adelaide Crapsey, Emily Dickinson, Louise Imogen Guiney, Ella Higginson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Emma Lazarus, Agnes Lee, Katherine Mansfield, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1947). Marjorie Barrows. ed. One Thousand Beautiful Things. Peoples Book Club. 

Short Stories

• "A girl to love". The Vassar Miscellany (Vassar College) 27 (2). 1897. 
• "The knowledge he gained". The Vassar Miscellany (Vassar College). 1898. 

Songs

• George Antheil (1934). Five Songs, 1919-1920, for Soprano and Piano: After Adelaide Crapsey. Cos Cob Press.  (reprint Publisher Boosey & Hawkes, 1986)
• William Alexander (1986). Cinquains: For Soprano Voice, Clarinet, Cello, and Piano : (1980). 
• Paul Moravec. Evensong: Song Cycle for Tenor and Piano. 

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Adelaide Crapsey

• Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey by Karen Alkalay-Gut
• Poems by Adelaide Crapsey on verse.fr
• Example of Adelaide Crapsey's American Cinquain
• Example of Adelaide Crapsey's doublet form of couplet 'On Seeing Weather-beaten Trees'
• Adelaide Crapsey's poetry
• A photograph of Adelaide Crapsey during her last year at Saranac Lake
• "DISCOVERING ADELAIDE CRAPSEY: CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT", Karen Alkalay-Gut
• "THE POEMS OF ADELAIDE CRAPSEY", Karen Alkalay-Gut
• Adelaide Crapsey Papers, collected at University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries, Dept. of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation. Collection register and Collection description.