Lost Modernist Women: Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)

by Ryan Elston

[Editor’s Note: To read the first article in this series, “Lost Modernist Women: Viola Paradise,” click here.]

Adelaide Crapsey

Ryan 
Elston Presents -
Lost Modernist Women: 
Adelaide Crapsey, Imagist
Poet

How to
introduce this
overlooked genius who 
transformed poetry and left us
too soon?

Her name
was Adelaide
Crapsey (unfortunate 
name), and she dared to invent a
new form.

Five lines:
two syllables,
followed by four, then six,
then eight, finished with two more – the
cinquain.

Such an
original
and innovative new
structure to succinctly express
the self!

Did she
predict the tweet,
the text message? Poet
and prophet, so far ahead of 
her time.

Only 
age 36
when tuberculosis 
claimed her in 1914, yet
she lived.

What a
remarkable
life! She taught, she traveled,
and she wrote, despite her chronic 
fatigue.

She left
a book of verse,
a treatise on metrics,
and her revolutionary 
cinquain.

Her words
and images
shimmer, startle, provoke.
Haunting and resonant, they stay
with you.

Dearest 
Adelaide, we
thank and honor you. May
you be remembered. May your words
be read. 

****

NIAGARA
by Adelaide Crapsey

    Seen on a Night in November

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.


NOVEMBER NIGHT
by Adelaide Crapsey

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


TRIAD
by Adelaide Crapsey

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow . . . the hour
Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one
Just dead.


RELEASE
by Adelaide Crapsey

With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.


NIGHT WINDS
by Adelaide Crapsey

The old
Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?


ROMA AETERNA
by Adelaide Crapsey

The sun
Is warm to-day,
O Romulus, and on
Thine olden Palatine the birds
Still sing.


BLUE HYACINTHS
by Adelaide Crapsey

In your
Curled petals what ghosts
Of blue headlands and seas,
What perfumed immortal breath sighing
Of Greece.


THE GRAND CANYON
by Adelaide Crapsey

By Zeus!
Shout word of this
To the eldest dead! Titans,
Gods, Heroes, come who have once more
A home!


MOON-SHADOWS
by Adelaide Crapsey

Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.


THE WARNING
by Adelaide Crapsey

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?