Аделаида Крэпси: Жизнь и творчество американской поэтессы.

American writer

Adelaide Crapsey (September 9, 1878 – October 8, 1914) was an American poet. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Rochester, New York. Her parents were the businesswoman Adelaide T. Crapsey and the Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who moved from New York City to Rochester.

Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878, in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Her parents were Algernon Sidney Crapsey and Adelaide (Trowbridge) Crapsey. She was their third child, after her brother, Philip, and her sister, Emily. Adelaide was baptized on November 1, 1878, at Trinity Church in New York City, where her father was an assistant minister. Before she was a year old, her father had become the rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Rochester, New York. His family followed him to Rochester from New York City on the canal boat. In Rochester, Adelaide attended the public schools.

To continue her research, in December 1908 she returned to Europe. She lived in Rome, Great Britain, and France. She spent February and March 1908 in the Anglo American hospital in Rome. Later that year, she was diagnosed with tuberculin meningitis. It was also in 1911 that she wrote her first cinquains. For example, she wrote a poem she called "Lines Addressed To My Left Lung Inconveniently Enamoured of Plant Life."

Crapsey's biographer Karen Alkalay Gut described her life as "constantly hampered by illness, grief, and impecunity." The discrepancy between what she had anticipated doing and what she "actually accomplished was embarrassing to her." The five line cinquain poetic form she created reflected her life. The first four lines build up "expectancy" only to be followed by a one stress line as an "abbreviated conclusion." Crapsey's hope for her immortality was in her writings. The envoi of her Verse, entitled "The Immortal Residue," reads: Using his Manus Press, he published a book of Crapsey's poems entitled Verse (Manas Press, 1915). In her introduction to Verse, Webster writes that Crapsey was "by nature as vivid and joyous and alive a spirit as ever loved the beauty of life, like Keats and Stevenson, worked doggedly for many years against the numbing weight of a creeping pitiless disease." Revised editions of Verse were published in 1922 and 1934 and contain earlier unpublished work. Also published posthumously in 1918 was the unfinished A Study in English Metrics, a work she began during her three year stay in Europe and described in its prefatory note as "a laborious analysis dictated by an acute sense of beauty of verse by an aesthetic experience of unusual intensity." Crapsey's ashes were buried in the Crapsey family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery. Crapsey's nephew, Arthur H. Crapsey, became an influential industrial designer in the years following World War II. He is known for a series of iconic camera designs for Eastman Kodak. Crapsey's papers are in the University of Rochester Library archives. 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."

American Poetry, The Twentieth Century, Volume One, The Library of America, 2000.