Niagara Falls

Poetry Project  

Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878 in Brooklyn, New York. She was the third daughter of Episcopalian Rev. Algernon Sidney Crapsey and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey. She was an honours student at Vassar College, and then became a teacher. She contracted tuberculosis somewhere around 1903, and died on October 8, 1914.

She had been working on a study of metrics that proved too exhausting for her to continue after the onset of her illness, and so she concentrated on poetry. She is known as the inventor of the cinquain - a poem of 5 short lines of unequal length, of which Niagara is one. Her poems were published posthumously.

Adelaide Crapsey - early 1900's