Two by Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Today’s poems–”The Hill Place” and “Day’s Diamond”–come from Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Coffin (1892-1955) grew up in Brunswick, Maine on a “saltwater farm.” He attended Bowdoin, Princeton, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar before, as well as after, serving two years in World War I. He taught at Wells College in Aurora, New York from 1921-1934 and eventually returned to Bowdoin College, where he was Pierce Professor in English from 1934 until his death in 1955.

Throughout his life, Robert Coffin successfully combined the roles of artist and teacher, poet and prose writer. He authored more than forty books, and was awarded many honors, including the 1936 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book, Strange Holiness. In 1945, Coffin was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters for “work of permanent value in American literature,” and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences granted him membership in 1949.

-bio via University of New Hampshire

As promised, Coffin’s essay, Night of Lobster