ABSTRACT
O n a clear fall morning at the close of World War II, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, poet laureate of Maine, flew with a friend in a light plane over his family homestead on the state's fabled rock-bound coast. Lofted above this iconic landscape, Coffin gained perspective on a troubling time of global depression and war. A land as richly textured as Maine's, he thought, would surely buffer its inhabitants against this chaotic world: “how could people living in the midst of such splendor be dull or drab or ordinary?” he reasoned. “They had come naturally by their sparkle.” Recoiling from a world torn by economic confusion and social violence, Coffin described a fantasy of Maine island life cut off from the modern world. “We can always blow up the bridges to the mainland … and return to the free life, the life without fences.”
