In 1955, when Robert P. Tristram Coffin was stricken in the chapel at Westbrook Junior College, he was one of America's busiest, most loved, and most successful poets. The Pulitzer Prize winner had just returned from a week at Macalester College to his regular teaching at Bowdoin College in Maine; but typically he was spending that particular evening giving a public lecture in nearby Portland. That the New York Times had printed his poem "The Wisdom of Forgetting Mortal Things" three days before was only an ironic coincidence, because Coffin had had at least one work accepted for publication every month since Bowdoin had given him a doctor of letters degree in 1930. His Selected Poems (1955) was well into production with the Macmillan Company, which had already published nearly thirty volumes of his works; and the same issue of the New York Times that gave his death front-page notice told...