Verse

Adelaide Crapsey

Franklin Classics Trade Press

Adelaide Crapsey - Cinquains & Other Verse Public Domain Poets #6 Cinquains & Other Verse contains a generous selection of Adelaide Crapsey's cinquains, and various other poems, originally published in her posthumous volume of poetry, Verse (1915), with a preface by Jean Webster, and William Stanley Braithwaite. New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte. The Sun-Dial Every day, Every day, Tell the hours By their shadows, By their shadows. Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Vassar College, where she was class poet three years in a row. After graduating, Crapsey taught history & literature at Kemper Hall in Wisconsin, and then studied at the School of Archaeology in Rome. I know Not these my hands And I think there was A woman like me once had hands Like these. Around this time, she began writing 'free verse', drawing inspiration from the French 'vers libre', Japanese hokku and tanka, and the work of Yone Noguchi, among other things. This led to Crapsey developing an English-language 5-line poetic form called the 'cinquain', modeled in part on tanka, which led to some of her most memorable verses (written between 1911 and 1913). Listen . . . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees, And fall. Unfortunately, Crapsey's life was plagued with illness, and she died in 1914 at the age of 36. While leaving behind a single slim volume of poetry, Crapsey's terse, unrhymed poems would go on to inspire a number of poets central to the post-1913 'new verse' movement, including Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge, Yvor Winters, and Carl Sandburg (et al.). These be Three silent things: The falling snow . . . the hour Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one Just dead. Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented "free" verse from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collection, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.

Adelaide Crapsey - Cinquains & Other Verse

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Public Domain Press

This book presents the poetry and letters of the American writer Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914). Her best poetry deserves to be enjoyed by a larger audience, and her letters and newly discovered biographical materials reveal new charm and meaning in an intriguingly elusive character. Crapsey did not live to see any of her mature poetry published: she received notice that her first poem had been accepted for publication only a week before she died. Posthumous editions of her Verse (in 1915, 1922, and 1934), however, brought her recognition and respect. Carl Sandburg paid her a poetic tribute. American critic Yvor Winters praised her as "a minor poet of great distinction" and felt that her poems remained "in their way honest and acutely perceptive." Her best work is compressed, terse, related in this respect to the work of another American poet who won posthumous recognition, Emily Dickinson. Crapsey is best known as the inventor of the cinquain, a poem of five short lines of unequal length: one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress, and one-stress. The cinquain is one of the few modern verse forms developed in English, and its brevity and characteristic thought pattern seem to have been influenced by Japanese forms. Crapsey's indebtedness to Japanese poetry and her relation to Imagism have long been subjects for debate. As Winters notes, the work of Crapsey "achieves more effectively than did almost any of the Imagists the aims of Imagism." The critical introduction by Professor Susan Sutton Smith examines these problems. Much of Crapsey's poetry is reticent, withdrawn, and private, and she believed strongly in the individual's right to privacy. Whatever new biographical materials reveal of her and of her relations with family and friends, however, shows a charming and courageous woman. Her courage and humor show especially well in her correspondence with her friend Esther Lowenthal and in the letters with her friend Jean Webster McKinney, author of Daddy Long-Legs, who died soon after Crapsey.

The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

State University of New York Press

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Books by Adelaide Crapsey