Adelaide Crapsey

Crapsey, Adelaide (1878–1914), author of a slender volume, Verse (1915), written in the last year of her brief life. Of her fastidious poetry, the best‐known pieces are her cinquains, a stark metrical form of her own invention, resembling the Japanese haiku. The cinquain is a precise five‐line stanza, the lines having respectively two, four, six, eight, and two syllables. Her Verse was edited by Jean Webster, whose fictional heroines are said to be patterned after the poet.

Adelaide Crapsey , 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).

Webster, Jean (1876–1916), New York author of juvenile novels, whose best‐known works are Daddy‐Long‐Legs (1912), a sentimental, humorous story of orphanage life, and the Patty series about a young college girl. The prototype of the heroine of both the novel and the series is said to have been her friend Adelaide Crapsey, whose Verse she edited (1915).