Adelaide Crapsey

Poet. Daughter of Algernon Sidney Crapsey.

In the years before her untimely death from tuberculosis, she wrote much of the verse on which her reputation rests. Her interest in rhythm and meter led her to create a unique variation on the cinquain (or quintain), a 5-line form of 22 syllables influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka.

Her five-line cinquain (now styled as an American cinquain) has a generally iambic meter defined as 'one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress and suddenly back to one-stress' and normally 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.

Marianne Moore said of her poetic style 'Crapsey's apartness and delicately differentiated footfalls, her pallor and color were impressive'.