Queer Places:
Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church, 95 Averill Ave, Rochester, NY 14620
Vassar College (Seven Sisters), 124 Raymond Ave, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604
Mount Hope Cemetery
Rochester, Monroe County, New York, USA
Adelaide
Crapsey (September 9, 1878 – October 8, 1914) was an American poet. Born in
Brooklyn, New York, she was raised in Rochester, New York, daughter
of Adelaide T. Crapsey and Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who had
moved from New York City to Rochester. The editors of Poetry, Harriet Monroe and
Alice Corbin Henderson
included in their 1917 selection for The New Poetry: An Anthology
poems by Adelaide Crapsey. According to
Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw,
authors of Amy Lowell, American Modern, what connects these poets is their
appartenance to the queer sisterhood.
Adelaide Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878 in Brooklyn Heights, New
York. Her parents were Algernon Sidney Crapsey (1847-1927) and Adelaide
(Trowbridge) Crapsey (1855-1950). She was the third child of her parents.
Their first child was a son Philip and their second child was a daughter
Emily. Two of Adelaide's sisters died while she was in college. Ruth died in
1898 of undulant fever at the age of eleven. Emily, with whom Adelaide was
closest, died in 1901 of appendicitis at the age of twenty-four.[6]
Adelaide was baptized on November 1, 1878 in Trinity Church in New York City
where her father was an assistant minister. Before Adelaide was a year old,
her father became the rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Rochester, N.
Y. His family followed him to Rochester from New York City on the canal boat.[1]
In Rochester, Adelaide attended the public schools.[2]
Crapsey was "raised in a liberal environment that encouraged great
expectations for women."[3]
After leaving the Rochester public schools, Adelaide with her sister Emily
entered Kemper Hall in 1893. Kemper Hall was an Episcopalian woman's college
preparatory school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At Kemper Hall, she took the college
preparatory courses which included Latin and French. She was the editor of the
school magazine and she played and refereed basketball. She graduated in 1897
as the valedictorian for her class.[4]
Adelaide matriculated in Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1897. She
had "a very active four years" in Vassar. For three years she was class poet.
She was the editor-in-chief of the Vassarion and managed the basketball team.
She was a member of the debating club and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She
played the role of Lucy the maid in the play The Rivals. Crapsey roomed with Jean
Webster who continued to be "her best friend and literary comrade" for the
rest of her life.[5]
Adelaide planned a career in teaching after graduating from Vassar in 1901.
However, before beginning work, she took a year off both "to regain her
strength" and "to recover from the shock" of Emily's death."[7]
After her year off, Adelaide returned to Kemper Hall to teach history and
literature in 1903-1904. While there, she suffered chronic fatigue, which was
a symptom of her not-yet-diagnosed tuberculosis. This caused Adelaide to leave
her teaching in 1904, to study at the School of Classical Studies of
the American Academy in Rome. She supported herself by working occasionally as
a lecturer.[8] In
Rome, she had a great "rebirth of energy and creativeness" in the warm and
temperate Italian climate. While there, she met a man "who reminded her of her
reason for living," which she had been seeking. However, the seriousness of
her father's situation faced with interviews by the Committee of
Investigation of the Diocese of Western New York (his diocese) and possible
charges of heresy brought Adelaide back home from Rome in 1905 to support her
parents.[9]
In 1906, the Diocese presented charges of heresy against Adelaide's father
and an Ecclesiastical Court was established and trial was set to be held
in Batavia, New York. On April 18, 1906, she went with her father and his
chief counsel to Batavia. At the end of the trial, her father was found guilty
of heresy.[11]
After the trial, Adelaide remained with her family to give them her "support,
comfort, and good humor." However, her "literary and academic future" had been
suspended for eighteen months. She needed a job near enough to Rochester to be
"relatively accessible to her family." She found such a job, teaching history
and literature at Miss Low's School in Stamford, Connecticut. Stamford was
also only a short train ride from New York City where her father's Court of
Appeal was held. The appeal was denied on November 20, 1906.[12]
Adelaide taught at Miss Low's for the academic years 1906-1907 and 1907-1908.
With her father's appeal having been denied, he was no longer a minister in
the Episcopal Church. He was given until the end of December 1906 to vacate
the St. Andrew's rectory.[13] Therefore,
when Adelaide went home for Christmas in 1906, the family was moving out of
the house in which had been her home for twenty-seven years and into a rented
house. When Adelaide went back to Stamford, other sad events followed. Her
grandmother Harriet Gunn Trowbridge, whom she had visited as a child, died. In
May 1907, her eldest brother Philip died of chronic malaria, which he had
contracted during the invasion of Cuba during the Spanish–American War.[14]
Adelaide was not happy teaching at Miss Low's school. The "atmosphere was
oppressive" to her; her horizons had expanded. Nevertheless, her teaching was
described as "thrilling." Her students "seemed to gravitate" to her classes.[15]
In 1907, Adelaide's father was a delegate to the International Peace
Conference at the Hague, and she accompanied him. During the Conference,
Adelaide, who was fluent in French, was in demand as a translator. The
Conference was conducted in French and the newspapers were printed in French,
a language which few Americans knew. The Crapseys left the Conference early
"disillusioned and disappointed." After the Conference, Adelaide and her
father took a walking tour of Wales. Dr. Crapsey was a tireless walker, but
Adelaide suffered fatigue.[16] The
cause of her fatigue was not diagnosed until 1911 when she was diagnosed
with Tuberculous meningitis.[17]
After they returned from Europe at the end of the summer of 1907, Adelaide and
her father joined the family in their "summer cottage." This gave her a month
before she returned to her teaching job at Miss Low's School in Stamford.
Adelaide used this time to recuperate and to ponder her future possibilities.
As the school year progressed, she became physically weaker. She lacked the
energy for activities other than those required of her.[18] Adelaide's
weakness probably derived from tuberculosis, although it had not yet been
diagnosed. She was so weak that, after a week's teaching, she often spent her
weekends in bed to recuperate.[19]
In the summer of 1908, while Adelaide was living with her family in Rochester,
she "took helplessly to bed." Because of her poor health, she decided that she
must quit her job at Miss Low's School. This left the question of "what would
she do?" hanging over her. She was now almost thirty. She was interested in
further research on her theory of metrics,[20] but
she was not interested in learning the theories of others.[21]
To continue her research, in December 1908 Adelaide returned to Europe. She
lived in Rome, Great Britain, and France. She spent February and March 1908 in
the Anglo-American hospital in Rome.[22] Her
research was included in a book A Study in English Metrics published in 1918.[23]
In 1911, a combination of health problems and financial issues forced Adelaide
to seek employment back in the United States.[24] Smith
College in Northampton, Massachusetts offered her a job teaching Poetics. She
accepted it.[25] Later
that year, she was diagnosed with tuberculin meningitis. It was also in 1911
that she wrote her first cinquains.[26]
In July 1913, Adelaide collapsed and was admitted sent to a private nursing
home in Saranac Lake, New York.[27] In
the nursing home, because of her "physical prostration," she was allowed to
write only one letter a day. Nevertheless, she managed to write letters and
poetry about her condition and her treatment. They contained "flippant humor,"
possibly as a way of covering the reality that she was at the mercy of a
disease for which there was no cure.[28]
In August 1914, sicker than ever, Adelaide left the nursing home and returned
to her parents' home in Rochester. She died there on October 8, 1914 at the
age of thirty-six.[30] As
she was dying, she "passed on the torch to her nurse," saying, "Let the story
I was not able to tell be told."[31] Crapsey's
ashes were buried in the Crapsey family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery.[41]
Adelaide's biographer Karen Alkalay-Gut described her life as "constantly
hampered by illness, grief, and impecunity." The discrepancy between what she
had anticipated doing and what she "actually accomplished was embarrassing to
her." The five-line cinquain poetic form she created reflected her life. The
first four lines build up "expectancy" only to be followed by a one stress
line as an "abbreviated conclusion."[33]
Claude Bragdon was a friend of the Crapsey family in Rochester. Besides being
a noted architect, he had a press.[36] Using
his Manus Press, he published a book of Crapsey's poems entitled Verse (Manas
Press, 1915).[37] The
book had a Foreword by Bragdon and a Preface by Jean Webster.[38] In
her Introduction to Verse, Webster wrote that Adelaide was "by nature as vivid
and joyous and alive a spirit as ever loved the beauty of life, like Keats and
Stevenson, worked doggedly for many years against the numbing weight of a
creeping pitiless disease."[39]
Revised editions of Verse were published in 1922 and 1934 and contain earlier
unpublished work. Also published posthumously in 1918 was the unfinished A
Study in English Metrics, a work she began during her three-year stay in
Europe, and described in the prefatory note thereto as "a laborious analysis
dictated by an acute sense of beauty of verse by an aesthetic experience of
unusual intensity."[40]
Poet Carl Sandburg was partly responsible for the continued interest in the
cinquain and in keeping Crapsey from obscurity through his poem "Adelaide
Crapsey."[43]
Adelaide Crapsey's nephew, Arthur H. Crapsey, became an influential industrial
designer in the years following World War II, and is known for a series of
iconic camera designs for Eastman Kodak. Adelaide Crapsey's papers are at the
University of Rochester Library archives.[44]
Marianne Moore said of her poetic
style, "Crapsey's apartness and delicately differentiated footfalls, her
pallor and color were impressive."[50]
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