Two by Robert P. Tristram Coffin

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.1	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, March 18th, 2004.
0:09.6	Today's poem is by Robert P.T. Coffin, born this day in 1892.
0:17.9	Coffin was a World War I veteran, teacher, literary, editor, and critic, as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of poetry.
0:31.4	Coffin also is the author of what I would call a seminal piece of food writing.
0:40.2	An essay he wrote for Gourmet magazine in the 40s called Night of Lobster,
0:47.3	which is a great human interest piece about an encounter with a main lobster fisherman.
0:54.3	I will try and put a link to that essay down in his show notes.
0:58.9	In fact, when he is remembered, which is tragically not often enough these days,
1:06.4	Coffin's name comes up in association with his essays almost as often as it does with his poems.
1:15.3	Today our business is with the poems, though, and we'll be reading two.
1:20.8	Both do a great job of encapsulating what Coffin was known for as a poet, taking something
1:31.9	commonplace or even transitory, momentary, some object in decay or some fleeting moment,
1:43.1	and enshrining them in his poems so that they take on a sort of
1:51.6	eternality, a lasting monument that might even live beyond the thing itself.
2:08.0	He was a great hand at taking the commonplace and elevating it in that way.
2:11.1	The first is called the Hill Place.
2:24.5	The Tompkins homestead was the sort men used to build when men could be at home in safety with their thoughts, their God, and their fecundity.
2:36.9	Set high upon a hill, it seemed consecrate to some design. A house the older gods would choose for ends malignant yet divine. The family here were six removes from the man who built it strong. Perhaps they were unwise to stay in one dwelling place so
2:42.5	long. For one son went about the place with footsteps very light and wary and nothing lit behind his
2:49.7	eyes, and two of the girls would never marry.
2:54.0	There were too many silences in the rooms above, below.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.