Coffin, Robert Peter Tristram (1892-1955), was an American author best known for his poems about Maine, his native state. Coffin won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Strange Holiness (1935).
Coffin was born on March 18, 1892, in Brunswick, Maine. Many of his writings describe the world of his childhood and youth in Maine. The central elements of his poetry are the sights and sounds of the Maine coast. In his later poetry, especially People Behave Like Ballads (1946), Coffin wrote about the rural people of Maine, whose endurance and good humor he valued highly. Coffin’s verse is generally optimistic in tone.
Coffin also wrote novels, biographies, and criticism. His novel Lost Paradise (1934) re-creates his boyhood on a farm on the Maine seacoast. Portrait of an American (1931) is a biography of his father. Coffin’s critical essays on poetry were published in New Poetry of New England: Frost and Robinson (1938) and The Substance That Is Poetry (1942). He died on Jan. 20, 1955.
