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Maine Writers Index - Detail (Return to List) Robert P. Tristam Coffin (1892 - 1955)Genre: PoetryBorn in Brunswick, a 1915 graduate of Bowdoin, and later a professor there (1934-1955), essayist, poet, and novelist Coffin won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Strange Holiness. The Bowdoin Special Collections Library gives detailed information about the almost 50 linear feet of manuscripts, drafts, proofs, notes, personal records, lectures, plays, poems, books, recordings, and photographs that it holds. Two biographical pages are found on the Bowdoin Special Collections page on Coffin and from A Princeton Companion - entry for Coffin (which records an incorrect date for the Pulitzer). Coffin is also featured in Down East Today (1938; Virginia Smith Hall), along with Mary Ellen Chase, Gladys Hasty Carroll, and Rachel Field. Coffin's works include: Poetry: Christchurch (1924), Dew & Bronze (1927), Golden Falcon (1929), The Yoke of Thunder (1932), Ballads of Square-Toed Americans (1933), Strange Holiness (1935; won Pulitzer), Fifteen Girls on a Hobby Horse (1937; collection of short stories and poems), Saltwater Farm (1937), Maine Ballads (1938), There Will Be Bread and Love (1942), Primer for America (1943), Poem for a Son with Wings (1945), Apples By Ocean (1945/1950), People Behave Like Ballads (1946), Collected Poems (1948), One-Horse Farm: Down East Georgics (1949), The Third Hunger and the Poem Aloud (1949), Poems That Write the Poet (1953; poetic text of a lecture at Haverford College, given 1898), Hellas Revisted (1954; a collection by Coffin's friends), Selected Poems (1955). Essays: Book of Crowns and Cottages (1925), An Attic Room (1929), New Poetry of New England: Frost & Robinson (1938; lectures),
The Substance That Is Poetry (1942),
Novels: Red Sky in the Morning (1935), John Dawn (1936), and Thomas, Thomas -- Ancil Thomas (1941). Biographies and other Non-Fiction: A Book of Seventeenth-Century Prose (1929; co-edited),
Laud: Storm Center of Stuart England (1930), The Dukes of Buckingham (1931),
Lost Paradise: A Boyhood on a Maine Coast Farm (1934; based on recollections of childhood
spent on Pond Island), Portrait of an American (1935; about his father),
Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (1937/1965/2002), Captain Abby and Captain John (1939/2002; about The Pennells of Brunswick),
Yankee Coast (1947), Christmas in Maine (1948), Do You Know Maine? (1948), Coast Calendar (1949),
Life in America: New England (1951). |