Adelaide Crapsey is remembered as the inventor of the cinquain (five unrhymed lines of varying stress) and for the distinctive compression of her best work. Editions of her poems were published in the 1920s and 1930s, and she was praised by anthologist Louis Untermeyer as "an unconscious Imagist" and by critic Yvor Winters as "a minor poet of great distinction," but most anthologies of American poetry published after 1950, even those of poetry by women, omit her work entirely.

Adelaide Crapsey was born in Brooklyn Heights, New York, third child and second daughter of the Reverend Algernon Sidney Crapsey, an Episcopal minister, and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey. Her father became rector of St. Andrew's Church in Rochester, New York, in 1879, and six more Crapsey children were born in Rochester. Crapsey was an excellent student at public schools in Rochester (1884-1893), at Kemper Hall, an Episcopal boarding school in Kenosha, Wisconsin...