Who is adelaide crapsey

In she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but withheld the news from her family. She continued teaching at Smith until the summer of , when she collapsed.

She then moved to a cure cottage at 71 Clinton Avenue in Saranac Lake, where she stayed for a year in a room overlooking Pine Ridge Cemetery , where she wrote perhaps her best-known poem, "To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window. Crapsey created a variation on the cinquain, a 5-line form of 22 syllables that was influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka; an example is her poem, "Niagara". She also developed a new form of couplet, with two rhyming lines of ten syllables.

The year following her death, a posthumous selection of her cinquains and other poems was published. Carl Sandburg's poem, "Adelaide Crapsey," brought her work to wider attention. How can you lie so still? All day I watch And never a blade of all the green sod moves To show where restlessly you turn and toss, Or fling a desperate arm or draw up knees Stiffened and aching from their long disuse; I watch all night and not one ghost comes forth To take its freedom of the midnight hour.

Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones? The very worms must scorn you where you lie, A pallid, mouldering, acquiescent folk, Meek habitants of unresented graves. Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: "Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest. I will not lie still! Crapsey returned to America in and taught poetics at Smith College.

Concealing this diagnosis from her family, Crapsey continued to teach at Smith until , when her frail condition finally forced her to resign. She entered a sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York, and it was here that she composed her best verses. Crapsey invented a new poetic form, the cinquain. Like the Japanese haiku and tanka forms that inspired it, the cinqain has often been misinterpreted as a syllabic form—in which each line must contain a certain number of syllables.

True to her earlier metrical theory, however, the cinqain is not defined by naturally accented syllables, but by poetic stresses. The true form of a Crapseian cinqain is therefore a 5-line poem with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 1, stress-lines, respectively. The concentrated nature of the form results in stanzas that are sparse and delicate; they focus on a single image, relaying the realization of a simple truth. Armed with her invented form—which was short enough for Crapsey to write without significant fatigue, which was quickly becoming a constraint in all her other writing—she composed a torrent of poems from her sickbed.

Many of them reflect on the nature of life and death, on mortality and futility, but they also display defiance and a sardonic sense of humor. In October of , at the age of 36, Crapsey died at her family home in Rochester. A year following her death, her own selection of poems, Verses , was published. She then moved to a private cure cottage in Saranac Lake, New York, where she stayed for a year. In August, , Crapsey returned to Rochester, where she died on October 8, , at the age of 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. Adelaide Crapsey also formulated the established epigram into a new form of couplet, a poem of two rhyming lines of ten syllables with an integral title.

The year following her death, Claude Bragdon published Verses, a posthumous selection of her cinquains and other verse forms. Revised editions were published in and and contain earlier unpublished work. Also published posthumously in was the unfinished A Study in English Metrics, a work she began during her three-year stay in Europe.

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