Crapsey, Adelaide

Crapsey, Adelaide (krăp`sē), 1878–1914, American poet, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., grad. Vassar, 1901; daughter of Algernon Sidney Crapsey. After teaching in girls' schools she became an instructor at Smith College. A slender volume, Verse, which won high praise from critics, appeared a year after her early death from tuberculosis; a new edition with 20 additional poems was issued in 1934. Her special contribution to verse form is the cinquain—a compressed five-line verse resembling the Japanese haiku in its fragile precision and expressive delicacy.

Bibliography

See biography by M. E. Osborn (1933).

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Crapsey, Adelaide (1878–1914) poet; born in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y. She attended Vassar (1897–1901), studied archaeology in Rome (1904–05), taught school in America (1902–04; 1908), and lived in Rome (1908–13). Using an innovative verse form called cinquains, she anticipated the Imagist poets, as seen in her Verses (1915). She died of tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, N.Y.