Case Study #1: Adelaide Crapsey

One of my possible theses is a series of case studies of female artists in the years 1890-1920ish - partly for their own sake, because so many of these women were so interesting, but also to illustrate a wider theme about Art and creativity and its intersection with femininity around the turn of the century.

The problem, I can already see, is going to be winnowing down the list. One of my possibles is Adelaide Crapsey, a terribly, terribly romantic turn-of-the-century poet. She died of consumption. Just like Keats.

But before her demise, Adelaide invented a new form of poem, the cinquain: English's answer to the haiku, based on stresses rather than syllables. It was the result of years of study. She attended Vassar (where she roomed with Jean Webster, who wrote Daddy-Long-Legs) and then went to Europe and bounced between Rome and London and Paris, weak and ill but pushing forward to study.

Upon returning to the US, she taught English classes at Smith College. But she grew steadily weaker, until her doctors diagnosed consumption (actually, by the 1910s they were probably saying tuberculosis, but shhh, that's less Keatsian) and she retreated to Saranac Lake in upstate New York. On the lakeshore, beneath the evergreens, she wrote the sharp, poignant cinquains on which her reputation largely rests.

November Night

Listen.
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.