Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. Two years after graduation she began work as a teacher of History and Literature, in Kemper Hall, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she had attended preparatory school. In 1905 she went abroad, studying archaeology in Rome. After her return she essayed to teach again but her failing health compelled her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson’s, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her “Cinquains,” a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

“Her death,” writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, “was tragic. Full of the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished.” She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of the unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published in 1918.