The Roots of the American Cinquain

by Judith Ecker Budreau

     This essay explores the beginnings of the five line poetry form known as American cinquain, specifically the format developed c. 1910 by the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey, and looks at one of the questions raised by Crapsey's work: Is her cinquain form uniquely suited to the English language, as she maintained? A future essay in an upcoming issue of Amaze will consider the possibilities and limitations that contemporary poets find with the cinquain form and how the form has evolved with use by contemporary poets.

     Ms. Crapsey developed the poetry form she called "cinquain" following her frustration with her ambitious and uncompleted study of metrics in English language poetry. Crapsey's specifications for the form seem based on her understanding of Japanese tanka and haiku, with similar syllabic and/or accentual stress patterns, their spareness meant to contrast with the poem's emotional impact:

TRIAD (c. 1911)

These be
Three silent things
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead.

     As Mary Oliver points out in A Poetry Handbook (1994), most English poetry is written in pentameter "simply because the pentameter line most nearly matches the breath capacity of our English language - that is, speaking in English - and thus it is the line most free from any special effect…All deviations from the norm…emit messages" (40).

     Crapsey seems to have developed her cinquain form, with its distinctive 2-4-6-8-2 syllabic pattern in admiration of tanka and haiku, and in response to more traditional English poetry forms, which were often written to be recited aloud. Her cinquains were designed with the printed page in mind, meant to be read by an individual reader, who would savor the few syllables falling back to the last simple line. Another example:

NIAGARA (c. 1912)
Seen on a Night in November

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

     Adelaide Crapsey did not write about the cinquain form she invented, but she talked about her ideas with friends and colleagues. We have an account from her friend, Adelaide Draper, who recalled Crapsey visiting her in New York City in the spring of 1911. Crapsey read aloud a new poem she'd written:

SONG

I make my shroud but no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair,
With stitches set in even rows,
I make my shroud but no one knows.

In a door-way where the lilac blows,
Humming a little wandering air,
I make my shroud and no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair. (Verse, 1915)

     Crapsey knew by this time that she was desperately ill, but kept to her habit of avoiding discussion of this with family and friends. Instead, still fascinated as much with the rhythm and metrics of the English language as with meaning, she emphasized to Draper the "sequence of rising and falling [vowel] tones" and explained "'that certain combinations of sound were particularly effective, and she had tried for these combinations.'" Draper also remembered Crapsey reading aloud several cinquains, "enthusiastic about the form she had created and emphasizing its "formal inevitability…working up to and falling away from a climax" (Alkalay-Gut, 254).

     After her graduation from Vassar College in 1901, Crapsey began researching metrics in English language poetry, hoping to publish her work with the Modern Language Association. Her research focused on the rhythms inherent in polysyllabic lines, and she constructed elaborate charts showing syllable counts, line by line, in the poetry of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne and others. Most of her earlier poems are written in traditional verse forms, and some free verse, consisting of what Alkalay-Gut calls "poetically conventional answers to general questions of life" (305). Crapsey admired Keats' poetry, especially, and seems to have felt a deeper affinity once her own tuberculosis was discovered. She included her poem "John Keats," written in Rome in 1909, in her manuscript for Verse (1915):

…for thou art come
Upon the remote, cold place
Of ultimate dissolution and
with dumb, wide look
Thou, impotent, dost feel
Impotence creeping on
Thy potent soul… (3-9)

     By 1910, her metrics work lagged during her increasingly frequent bouts with illness, and by 1913 she knew she'd be unable to draw significant conclusions from her research. She turned with renewed interest to a manuscript of her poetry, including a section called "Cinquains, 1911-1913" containing twenty-five poems written in the carefully constrained form she had developed. Crapsey's Vassar classmates, the author Jean Webster (Daddy Long Legs) and Esther Löwenthal, had worked for months to help her order and transcribe the poems. They presented this manuscript to Crapsey's parents on the day she died in October, 1914 and were instrumental in publishing it as Verse the next year. Another edition of Verse was published in 1922 by Alfred A. Knopf with a foreword by Jean Webster, and the addition of three more cinquains. The book was so well-received that Knopf published four more editions by 1938.

     Crapsey's biographer, Karen Alkalay-Gut, makes two important observations about these cinquains: First, that their terseness works against the Romantic poetry which Crapsey spent many years studying and analyzing, "a refusal to look through any softening lenses at reality, including the lens of poetic convention." Secondly, the cinquain series represents snapshots of frozen time "each moment an opportunity for deciphering a small secret of life," these data points a condensed version of the syllabic charts created in Crapsey's study of metrics. (Alkalay-Gut, 310-311). Alkalay-Gut argues, I think believably, that both of these aspects are due to Crapsey's awareness of her impending death, and her desire to leave not just her poetry behind, but a record of herself as a writer, engaged with the language she studied all her life.

     There is evidence that Crapsey was one of the first to translate Japanese tanka and haiku into English - not from the Japanese, but from the French. Her papers at the University of Rochester contain several pages copied from Michel Revon's Anthologie de la Litterature Japonais (1910) along with her translations into English. Aaron Toleos, whose web site Cinquain.org, served as the forum for his 2006 study of the American cinquain, notes that while it's "unclear how well Crapsey understood the complexities of the haiku and tanka traditions beyond metrical considerations… one might surmise that the juxtaposition, compression, and restraint found in her cinquains represents partly the influence of these Japanese forms on her own." (Toleos, 2006).

     Scholars who have studied Adelaide Crapsey's notebooks, including Alkalay-Gut, appear to agree that she began her exploration of the cinquain form with an emphasis on accentual verse - the five lines of each cinquain were meant to have 1, 2, 3, 4, and 1 stresses, in order, in iambic foot. This would have been consistent with her knowledge of other five-line poetry forms like the French cinquain, the English quintain, the Japanese tanka. But she quickly moved to a consideration of syllabic stress in the five lines: 2, 4, 6, 8, and the final two syllables in the last line, which sometimes sacrificed the iambic meter.

     Following an accepted poetic convention of her day, each line of Crapsey's cinquains begins with a capital letter, and most lines are punctuated. Every one of Crapsey's cinquains is titled - many of her cinquains make little sense without their accompanying titles. This, of course, is a departure from the rarely titled tanka and haiku on which Crapsey based the cinquain.
Most distinctive, perhaps, is Crapsey's use of a poetic "turn" at line five, which we know she clearly defined as the "formal inevitability…working up to and falling away from a climax." (Alkalay-Gut, 254).

     Modern poets working in the cinquain form almost never worry about iambic meter, focusing on syllable count instead. Some title their cinquains, others prefer not to. Ironically, it's often the poets who come to cinquains by way of haiku and tanka who are most reluctant to use titles - a turnabout of Crapsey's addition of titles to these forms. And there is disagreement about the importance of the "turn" at the last line. All of these questions lead to sometimes boisterous discussions among practitioners of the evolving cinquain form, as can be seen in the online discussion at CinquainPoets.

     How closely would Adelaide Crapsey have adhered to the principles and practices she developed with her fledgling cinquain form? We simply don't know. From the three years she wrote in the cinquain form, twenty-eight carefully crafted poems survive, but there's almost nothing in her notebooks to tell us what she weighed and considered, what she kept and what she discarded as she developed the poetic form she believed "'to be the shortest and simplest possible in English verse'" (Toleos, 2006).

     Perhaps it's enough that poets continue to explore the limits and possibilities of poetry with Adelaide Crapsey's American cinquain.

WORKS CITED

Alkalay-Gut, K. (1988). Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey. Athens: University of Georgia.

AMAZE: The Cinquain Journal Retrieved from http://members.aol.com/acinquain/index.html

CinquainPoets http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CinquainPoets/ July, August 2007 posts.

Crapsey, A. (1915). Verse. Rochester: Manas Press. (Kessinger reprint)

Garrison, D. (Spring/Summer 2002). "An introduction to the American cinquain." Amaze 1 (1).  Retrieved June 15, 2007 from
http://members.aol.com/acinquain/vol_1_no_1/v1n1articleDG.html

Oliver, M. (1994). A Poetry Handbook. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Toleos, A. (2005) Cinquain.org http://www.cinquain.org