author
Adelaide Crapsey
1878–1914
Best remembered for inventing the cinquain, she wrote small, exact poems that still feel fresh more than a century later. Her brief life gave American poetry a form of remarkable clarity and restraint.
1 Audiobook
Verse
by Adelaide Crapsey
About the author
Born in Brooklyn on September 9, 1878, and raised largely in Rochester, New York, Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet, teacher, and scholar. She studied at Vassar College, then taught for several years before illness cut short both her life and her literary career.
She is most closely associated with the cinquain, a compact five-line verse form she developed with great care. Critics and poetry organizations continue to remember her for the precision and emotional force of these short poems, many of which were written late in her life.
Crapsey died in Rochester on October 8, 1914, at just 36. Much of her mature work reached readers after her death, which has helped give her story a poignant place in American literary history: a writer of unusual discipline and originality whose voice endured far beyond a very short lifetime.