Death, Order, and Poetry

A DELAIDE Crapsey has been known in poetry anthologies, hand?T1~ books and encyclopedias of literature almost exclusively as the originator of the cinquain, a five line verse of varying stresses. Her paper on metrics, incomplete, antiquated, eccentrically scholarly, is unread, and her poems are usually considered of insufficient significance to be discussed as anything more than quaint examples of the only native American poetic genre. Very often a writer who gathers dust in libraries deserves no better fate, but in the case of Crapsey, it appears that the lack of seriousness with which she has been approached has blinded potential readers to the necessity of proper and individualized tools. Crapsey, a painstaking critic herself, had anticipated more careful treatment. When Adelaide Crapsey died of consumption in I9 I4, none of her major poetry had been published. And yet she left behind, along with many other poems, a collected work intended for the public eye. Susan Sutton Smith's restored Presentation Copy of

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