Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master

by Jenny Molberg (Editor), Christian Bancroft (Editor)

Poetry. Women's Studies. "Crapsey's selected poetry reads as the lost ligament between the essaying narratives of the nineteenth century and the spare, imagist experiments of the twentieth. Like Rilke, she belonged to neither world, though she mapped her poetic lineage back to the Romantics, specifically the doomed, dark February of John Keats in Rome. As the likes of Carl Sandburg praised her, she innovated forms based on Japanese haiku and tanka while Pound conjured up his metro apparitions. She is no voice of the old world nor the new."--David Keplinger




"Adelaide Crapsey was a visionary poet whose innovative approaches to form laid the groundwork for modernist poetics. Her 5-line cinquains bristle, breathlessly compressed, wriggling and alive. Though her spare, evocative, poems paved the way for the imagists, her work is also undeniably fresh and strange and contemporary, as when she addresses her failing lung, calling it a "freak I cannot pardon." In this Unsung Masters anthology, Crapsey--a vital, game-changing poet--finally takes her place in literary history."--Hadara Bar-Nadav




"It is high time contemporary literary scholars attended to the poetic voice of Adelaide Crapsey, a neglected New York literary treasure, whose verse at once illuminates and complicates the spirit of the fin de siècle and modernist literary movements in America. Molberg and Bancroft have compiled a collection of Crapsey's work poised to advance our understanding of the female experience of pain, loss, and courage in America. What an appropriate moment to reintroduce Crapsey, given our overdue contemporary evolution, wherein the world is--we hope--finally learning what it means to listen to, hear, and even value the unique female experience."--Ashley E. Reis

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2018

Reviews

[Timons Esaias]

I've been reading a number of poetry collections from the period during and leading up to World War I, paying particular attention to the shift from rhyme and form to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Reading a detailed discussion of Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914), who was busily trying to advance the science of prosody at the very time that Modernism was to put that whole subject on the back burner, filled in some gaps. This volume is particularly useful because it includes biography, anthology, letters and scholarly studies of her work. They combine to give a very intimate picture of this artist.

Crapsey was friends with some very successful artists and writers, and we know that they treated her as a star. This book gives us a good glimpse into why that was. Having died young of tuberculosis, there was a bit of posthumous romanticization, but this volume indicates that she'd earned her spurs and considerable respect while alive, despite the disease holding her back.

I was intrigued to see that she was insistent that English prosody needed to consider both syllabic and accentual measure; that English poems did not strictly adhere to either system, for the most part. That is the general understanding now, but in her day they were giving everything to accent. I also found it intriguing that she was making a case for dividing poets (and their poems) into groups based on the percentage of more-than-two-syllable words. I teach the use of short words in prose (quoting Strunk & White as well as Winston Churchill), so finding her counting syllables in Milton and Swinburne and so on strikes a familiar nerve. The woman was on to something.

Her invention of the cinquain, which was influenced by tanka, but also, I believe, by some Old English and Old Norse elements, is itself a step away from rhyme. And while she was counting Milton's syllables, she was reading the Vorticists. Most intriguing.

I enjoyed and admired this little collection, with one exception, that being the last paper in the collection: Patrick Thomas Henry's "'Frost-crisp'd' Verses: Adelaide Crapsey's Cinquains and the Poetics of Illness." It's not his argument that I disliked, but the blatherese in which it is written. Any work that uses situate as a verb twice in one paragraph -- a paragraph also containing the clause "we must complicate previous discussions of" -- probably violates one or more of the Geneva Conventions. A paragraph that begins "In mining Crapsey's investment in the intersections of illness and poetics, we inherently risk running afoul..." (the sentence continues with a 4-syllable, a 5-syllable and a 6-syllable word in the remaining ten) shows an avalanche of mixed metaphor, and misses the point of her emphasis on short words.

I am still trying to imagine how one can invest in an intersection without owning the road, and how one could mine that without risking collapse of the intersection... Just how one mines an investment is puzzle enough.

Ahem.

[Steven Felicelli]

Crapsey worth reclamation project, but the scholarship is pretty thin and Crapsey's quantified prosody theories are (imo of course) as tedious and point-missing as they were received by critics back then (presented as if those critics were fools who'd missed her genius)

Crapsey's poetry is very much worthwhile, however (and her aesthetic appraisals are certainly interesting, just not fruitful imo)

[Annette Boehm]

This book is, if you will, an introduction to Adelaide Crapsey and an invitation to explore her work further. I enjoyed the selection of poems, early and late, the selected letters, and the critical essays about Crapsey. For an in-depth review, check out my blog post about this book: https://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/2...