Robert Peter Tristram Coffin was an American poet, teacher, lecturer, and editor whose works, based on New England farm and seafaring life, were committed to cheerful depiction of the good in the world.
Background
Robert Peter Tristram Coffin was born on March 18, 1892 in Brunswick, Maine, United States. He was the son of James William and Alice Mary Coombs Coffin. His father was a successful farmer, fisherman, and merchant of the Casco Bay region. Robert Coffin spent his earliest years on the remote island farms that his father bought and restored to productivity. After a few years of this activity the family moved back to the mainland and settled on a saltwater farm near Sebascodegan, nine miles from Brunswick. Here, as the poet recalled in Lost Paradise, the ten Coffin children "struck their roots down into the soil their father had cleared, " and here he found the central subjects of his poetry. Inspired by his father's enthusiasms, which included reading, storytelling, singing, and drawing, Coffin began at an early age to write stories and verse.
Education
In 1911 he entered Bowdoin College. He once recalled, "I had been writing always, I think, when I entered Bowdoin. " As an undergraduate he edited the literary magazine, twice won the Hawthorne prize for short stories, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1915 Coffin graduated summa cum laude. Designated a Longfellow Scholar by Bowdoin, he continued his studies at Princeton University and was awarded the M. A. in English in 1916. The same year he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Trinity College, Oxford, where he intended to specialize in seventeenth-century literature and the poetry of John Donne. World War I, however, interrupted Coffin's plans. He was wounded and discharged from the service and in 1919 returned to Oxford, earning the B. A. in 1920. The next year he received the B. Litt. ; his examiners for that degree were Sir Walter Raleigh and the poet laureate Robert Bridges.
Career
At sixteen he was ambitious enough to send an admiring letter to Julia Ward Howe and to share his poetic dreams with Sarah Orne Jewett, whom he visited at her home in South Berwick. When his first poem was published in the Boston Sunday Globe, he added "Tristram" to his by-line, in honor of his great-grandfather, Tristram William Coffin, whose exploits in the War of 1812 had become family legend. Upon his enlistment in 1917 he underwent officers' training in Oxford, Plattsburgh and Fort Monroe and was commissioned second lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Corps. Shortly after his marriage Coffin was sent overseas as an adjutant with the Seventy-second Artillery of the American Expeditionary Force and served in France with the Camouflage Corps. In 1921 Coffin became an instructor in the English department of Wells College in Aurora. Rising quickly, he attained the position of full professor in 1928. After a year's leave in Oxford he returned to become department head at Wells. By 1929 Coffin had published three collections of poems, one anthology, and two collections of personal essays. The first of these collections, A Book of Crowns and Cottages (1925), describes Coffin's experiences in Oxford and on the Continent; the second, An Attic Room (1929), is devoted to reminiscences of his childhood and the Maine coast and foreshadows much of his subsequent development. During the next four years, while continuing to publish poems, he wrote four biographical volumes: Laud: Storm Center of Stuart England (1930), The Dukes of Buckingham (1931), Portrait of an American (1931), about his father, and Lost Paradise (1934), an autobiographical work. By this time Coffin illustrated most of his books with his own line drawings, a practice he continued throughout his career. In 1934 Coffin accepted the Franklin Pierce professorship at Bowdoin, where he remained happily for the next three decades, teaching Shakespeare and poetry writing and issuing more than thirty books of verse, fiction, reminiscence, criticism, and regional description. His subjects became, almost exclusively, the people of Maine and his own family history, and his prevailing tone was that of celebration. As a friend wrote, "Coffin was a folk-poet, a New England Carl Sandburg. " Two of his four novels, Red Sky in the Morning (1935) and John Dawn (1936), appeared soon after his return to the Casco Bay region, as did his Pulitzer prize-winning book of poems, Strange Holiness (1935). He bought both a saltwater farm like his father's and an old sea captain's house on Merrymeeting Bay, near the Kennebec River. He also purchased the one-room schoolhouse that he had attended as a boy. As restlessly prolific as his father, Coffin continued to write unabatedly; as he once explained, "I write all the time because I never feel right when I'm not writing. " He accumulated a number of awards and honors over the years, including election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1946). Widely sought after as a speaker, Coffin in 1938 gave the Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University. Published the same year as New Poetry of New England: Frost and Robinson, these lectures remain his most substantial piece of criticism. He also lectured at the University of New Hampshire Writer's Conference (of which he was cofounder) from 1938 to 1951, and from 1948 until 1952 he taught poetry and short-story writing at the Fine Arts Colony in Corpus Christi. His Collected Poems appeared in 1939, followed by an expanded edition in 1948, and Selected Poems was released in 1955. Champion of Maine and its writers, Coffin defended himself against the attacks of the New Critics and refrained from adopting the despair of T. S. Eliot and other modernist poets. "Poetry, " he liked to repeat, "is saying the best one can about life. " Taken to task for his unflagging optimism and unguarded sentiment, he argued that "there is still the possibility of a poet's being a reaffirmer of life and a believer in certain compact and lasting fundamental patterns that it is the salvation of mankind to believe in. " Although Coffin's reputation was high during his lifetime, partly because he published frequently in such popular magazines as Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post, he was seldom considered by critics as being among the first rank. Notices in the Saturday Review pointed out his "fatal facility"; reviews in Poetry were even more unsparing: "For the unrestrainedly pat, for machine-like regularity in uninspired loquacity, Mr. Coffin has no competitors. " Yet he still seems to have cleared a place for himself in the interesting pantheon of Maine writers, from Sarah Orne Jewett to Kenneth Roberts, and no student of the region can afford to ignore Coffin's generous testaments to its enduring values. Coffin died in Portland, Maine.
Tall and robust, with curly hair and a sweeping moustache, Coffin liked to describe himself as a pirate. Friends frequently noted his great personal magnetism and the blend of mischief and humor in his eyes.
Connections
In Boston, on June 22, 1918, he married Ruth Neal Phillip; they later had two sons and two daughters.