Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey (9 September 1878 – 8 October 1914) was an American poet. 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 five-line form of twenty-two syllables influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka. Her cinquain has a generally iambic meter and consists of two syllables in the first and last lines and four, six and eight syllables in the middle three lines.

Adelaide Crapsey (circa 1900)

Quotes

• My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure.
  • A Study in English Metrics Alfred Knopf New York 1918.

Verses (1915)

• The old
  Old winds that blew
  When chaos was, what do
  They tell the clattered trees that I
  Should weep?
  • "Night Winds".

• These be
  Three silent things:
  The falling snow...the hour
  Before the dawn...the mouth of one
  Just dead.
  • Triad.

• Listen.
  With faint dry sound,
  Like steps of passing ghosts,
  The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
  And fall.
  • November Night.

• I know
  Not these my hands
  And yet I think there was
  A woman like me once had hands
  Like these.
  • Amaze