Adelaide was baptized on November 1, 1878, at Trinity Church in New York City, where her father was an assistant minister.

"[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.

Crapsey roomed with Jean Webster who continued to be "her best friend and literary comrade" for the rest of her life.

However, before beginning work, she took a year off both "to regain her strength" and "to recover from the shock" of Emily's death.

[4] In Rome, she had a great "rebirth of energy and creativeness" in the warm and temperate Italian climate.

Her mother was "too nervous and worn out from the months in the public eye," so Crapsey offered to serve the men tea.

[9] After the trial, Adelaide remained with her family to give them her "support, comfort, and good humor."

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.

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.

[4] In 1911, a combination of health problems and financial issues forced Crapsey to seek employment back in the United States.

[14] In July 1913, Crapsey collapsed and was admitted sent to a private nursing home in Saranac Lake, New York.

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.

[19] For example, she wrote a poem she called "Lines Addressed To My Left Lung Inconveniently Enamoured of Plant Life.

"[20] Crapsey's biographer Karen Alkalay-Gut described her life as "constantly hampered by illness, grief, and impecunity."

The envoi[22] of her Verse, entitled "The Immortal Residue," reads:[6] Claude Bragdon was a friend of the Crapsey family in Rochester.

[2] The book has a foreword by Bragdon and a preface by Jean Webster, who was Crapsey's roommate at Vassar and her lifelong friend.

[24] In her introduction to Verse, Webster writes that Crapsey 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.

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 its prefatory note as "a laborious analysis dictated by an acute sense of beauty of verse by an aesthetic experience of unusual intensity.

Her interest in rhythm and meter led her to create a unique variation[28] on the cinquain (or quintain), a 5-line form of 22 syllables influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka.

[29] Her five-line cinquain (now styled as an American cinquain)[30] has a generally iambic meter defined as "one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress and suddenly back to one-stress"[31] and normally consists of 2 syllables in the first and last lines and 4, 6 and 8 syllables in the middle three lines, as shown in the poem Niagara.

[32] Marianne Moore said of her poetic style, "Crapsey's apartness and delicately differentiated footfalls, her pallor and color were impressive.