Robert Coffin

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin was a native Mainer, Bowdoin College graduate, and longtime Bowdoin faculty member. Though popular writer and speaker in his time, his work is not widely known today. In this podcast episode, Kevin Belmonte, who recently completed a Master’s thesis on Coffin for the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, considers why. In the process, he shares pieces of Coffin’s correspondance and reads three poems aloud. Belmonte lives in York, Maine, where his family has resided since the 1630s. He is the author of William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 2007), for which he received the John Pollock Award for Christian Biography. He has served as a script consultant for the BBC and PBS.

Permission to read Coffin’s poems in this episode was generously granted by the Estate of Robert P. Tristram Coffin. We were also assisted by the staff at the George J. Mitchell Dept. of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin, where Coffin's papers are held. To leave your feedback, please add a comment to this post.