Robert P. T. Coffin

Robert Peter Tristram Coffin
Born	March 18, 1892 Brunswick, Maine
Died	January 20, 1955 Brunswick, Maine
Occupation	poet
Nationality	American

Robert Peter Tristram Coffin (March 18, 1892 – January 20, 1955) was a writer, poet and professor at Wells College (1921–1934) and Bowdoin College (1934–1955). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1936.

Life

A native of Brunswick, Maine, and member of one of New England's oldest families, Robert P. T. Coffin graduated from Bowdoin in 1915, and went on to earn graduate degrees from Princeton University (1916) and Oxford University (1920), where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is best known as the author of more than three dozen works of literature, poetry and history, including the book Strange Holiness, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1936.

His early poetry was derivative of classical forms (e.g., sonnets) and in verbiage and subject archaic. His mature poetry is marked by clarity of subject and symbolism, scanning and usually rhyming lines, and New England locales, persons (particularly farmers, fishermen, young boys, and old ladies), themes, and sometimes vocabulary and accent-based rhymes. He also wrote romantic prose.^[1]

There is a school in Brunswick, Maine named after him. Coffin School opened in 1955, in his honor. Coffin dedicated his book "Captain Abby and Captain John" to his fellow Bowdoin College classmate L. Brooks Leavitt, "a fellow son of Maine." Coffin subsequently wrote his poem "Brooks Leavitt" as a eulogy to his old friend, which was read at Leavitt's funeral in Wilton, Maine. "Captain Abby and Captain John" is one of his most well-known works, and centers around the characters Abby and John Pennell, two ship captains. A shipbuilding district of Brunswick known as Pennellville provided the inspiration for this book.

Coffin died of a heart attack in Brunswick, Maine on January 20, 1955. He was 62 years old.

Partial bibliography

Non-Fiction

• Book of Crowns and Cottages (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1925)
• Laud, Storm Center of Stuart England (1930)
• The Dukes of Buckingham, Playboys of the Stuart World (1931)
• Portrait of an American (The MacMillan Company, New York, 1931)
• Lost Paradise (Autobiography) (The MacMillan Co. New York, 1934)
• The Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) (First volume in the Rivers of America Series)
• Maine Ballads (The MacMillan Co., New York 1938)
• Primer for America (1943)
• Mainstays of Maine (The MacMillan Co., New York, 1944)
• Maine Doings (Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1950)

Fiction and Poetry

• Strange Holiness (1935)
• Red Sky in the Morning (The MacMillan Co., New York, 1935)
• John Dawn (1936)
• Saltwater Farm. J. J. Lankes (illustration). (The McMillan Co., New York, 1937.)
• Thomas-Thomas-Ancil-Thomas (1941)
• Book of Uncles (The MacMillan Co., New York, 1942)
• Poems for a Son with Wings (1945)
• People Behave Like Ballads (1946)
• Yankee Coast (1947)
• One Horse Farm (The MacMillan Company, New York, 1949)
• On the Green Carpet (1951)

References

Sources

• NNDB; American Book Exchange; List of books written in Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (1937)

External links

• Coffin collection, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College
• Audio introduction to Coffin's life and work by Coffin scholar Kevin Belmonte