Robert Peter Tristram Coffin
(born in Brunswick, Maine, 1892)
"Any A man who has good eyes and ears and lives in Maine," said Robert Peter Tristram Coffin, "is like a poet who has a lovely beauty as his equipment for housekeeping."
Mr. Coffin has the equipment. Descended from an old family of Nantucket whalers, he was reared in Maine and educated at Bowdoin, graduating summa cum laude in 1915. He later received an MA from Princeton, a BA from Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and a PhD from the University of Maine. He taught English at Wales College and, after 1934, became Professor of English at Bowdoin. He was a poet in Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard University in 1928, and in 1936 he won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Wonderful God." He is married, has four children, and lives on two farms in Brunswick.
His books are: Christchurch (poems, 1924), The Crown and the Cottage (essays, 1925), Dew and Bronze (poems, 1927), The Golden Falcon ( Poems, 1929), "An Attic Room" (Essays, 1929), "Ode, the Heart of the Storm in Stuart England" (Biography, 1930), "The Duke of Buckingham Palace" (1931), "Portrait of an American" (1931), "The Roar of the Yoke" (Collected Poems, 1932), "The Love Song of the Old-Fashioned American" (Poetry, 1933), "The Lost Paradise" (Autobiography, 1934), "The Wonderful God" (Poetry, 1935) , "The Red Morning Sky" (novel, 1935), "John Appears" (novel, 1936), "Seafood Farm" (poetry, 1937), "Kennebec: The Cradle of America" (American Rivers Series, Historical Works, 1937), New Poetry in New England (Turnbull Lectures, Johns Hopkins University, 1938), Poetry in Maine (Poetry, 1938), Collected Poems (1939), Captain A. Bee and Captain John" (biography, 1939), "A Collection: A Collection of Seventeenth-Century Essays" (with A. M. Withersup, 1929).
Mr. Coffin talks about poetry:
I have a feeling that poetry can still have a public function, just like it once did. It can be eloquent, convincing people of the imaginable possibilities in life, providing patterns that were once innate in religious faith but which are lost to many people today.
Poetry is the best a person can say about life...Poetry is the best preparation for great thoughts...It is the art of life that makes people feel good .
I find poems in the light of ordinary days, I also find them in sudden radiance, like on the road to Damascus... These are poems, a poem does not have to be written down . They came to him as poems, and he merely wrote them down. One or two of them can make anyone appreciate the precious opportunity of being alive.
A review of Coffin:
Robert Coffin, with his honest and simple poetry, weaves something useful and nobly into the fabric of our nation. Perhaps the torch of his native pine trees burns for a long time.
——Percy Hutchison
Mr. Coffin would rather fall under the influence of Robert Frost, who helped him to transform from ordinary speech, people and everyday things I see poetry in the scene. He wrote some quiet, unforgettable, great and beautiful lyric poems.
—Alan Ramsay
Robert Peter Tristram Coffin collected a vast collection of stuff that contained some amazing things. More sentimental than Mr. van Darwin, his poetry is also more colorful, sometimes with a beautifully painterly effect. He knew New England farm life, loved Maine, and could paint a vivid portrait or whip the beat of a brilliant ballad. His fault was dexterity...but he was a delightful American poet.