Fate Defied , The exotically named Adelaide Crapsey was a New York-born poet and English literature teacher whose short life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis. Her poetry output was fairly substantial but she will best be remembered by students of 19th and 20th-century poets as the inventor of a writing technique called “the cinquain”. This was probably born out of her love of the Japanese “tanka and haiku” forms of writing. It’s a kind of compressed style of writing that had many admirers including another famous writer, Ezra Pound.
Fate Defied by Adelaide Crapsey
As it
Were tissue of silver
I’ll wear, O Fate, thy grey,
And go mistily radiant, clad
Like the moon.