Maine is a Perpetual Poem?

I recently picked up an old book titled This is My Best: Over 150 Self-Chosen and Complete Masterpieces, Together with Their Reasons for Their Selections (pub 1942).

All very fascinating & fun to read. However, when I get to the section on Robert P. Tristram Coffin there appears to be a problem. He selected Maine is a Perpetual Poem as his best work, but the poem is not in the book. Instead there are four different poems (Humming-Bird, Golden Falcon, Crystal Moment, & The Secret Heart).

I thought perhaps Maine is a Perpetual Poem might be the title of a book of poetry but I can't find much on that either. Does anyone have this poem or book? Any light you can shed is appreciated.

How curious. I know nothing of RPT Coffin and in fact your post is the first time I've read the name. My immediate thought was he was playing a modernist game: that in fact, Maine (or his memory of boyhood there) is a perpetual reminder, an endless source of inspiration for his work and life. Could not find any support for that in my 10-minute online search, but of course that's quite superficial an exploration.

I'm curious what you or others find.

sounds right - other "Maine" references in his writings suggest the same: Maine as source of inspiration reflected in his poetry (home homage?)

I don't think the editor would have let him get away with selecting his internal memories of Maine as his best work. There are 100 authors in the book & while I haven't worked through them all, it seems like they all have the text of their "best" work in the book. (Wallace Stevens selected the poem "Domination of Black," Pearl Buck selected the story "The Old Demon," Dorothy Parker has "The Standard of Living," William Faulkner selected the story "That Evening Sun Go Down," Ernest Hemingway has "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.") Can't imagine them thinking that Hemingway & Faulkner can chose their best work for this book but Coffin is such a literary giant that he can skate by with his inspirations of Maine that exist solely inside his own head. No, I'd never heard of Mr. Coffin either.

I notice that James Branch Cabell is a contributor, but I've not been able to find which piece he selected. Would you mind sharing, SomethingWicked?

You've found a cozy literary mystery. No further insight after a little more online sleuthing. Coffin doesn't make any allusions to it in his rationale for selecting the 4 poems? Perhaps he persuaded Mr Burnett "Maine" was the provisional title of the mini-selection of 4 poems he made for that book.

ETA Ah, never mind: found what I wanted where I should have looked first, a Cabell site (The Silver Stallion). To wit (quoting from the Letters to the Editor page):

"Cabell was fond of acrostics and composed prefatory verses in that form for a dozen or so of his books. They are pretty skillfully done; you can find them by looking at the books in question, or you'll find them collected as Cabell's eccentric offering in Whit Burnett's This is My Best (1942)."

http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_letters.html

From the book This is My Best: Over 150 Self-Chosen and Complete Masterpieces, Together with Their Reasons for Their Selections (pub 1942).

"Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Why he selected Maine is a Perpetual Poem.

"I have favorites among my poems, of course. There are some poems that came to me sudden, out of the blue. I did not have to do anything about them. They were alive and came. One was a hummingbird that called on my morning glories. Another was a hawk who was my friend and flew two feet over my head and let me see the translucent amber stones set each side of his head."

The poems "Hummingbird" & "Golden Falcon" follow in the book. Then two more paragraphs about how the poems "Crystal Moment" & "The Secret Heart" came to him, followed by those poems.

Well, more than ever I'm inclined to think Coffin is referring figuratively to life itself, particularly his experiences in Maine, being his muse and as editor Mr Burnett was willing to allow him this poetic license. There's no proof in the lines you quote, of course (thanks for that, I couldn't find an online copy to peek into), but they can be read as supporting that interpretation.

The contributions from Cabell are much of the same. Cabell isn't well known today, but he was quite renowned in the 20s and 30s, both for his novels (among the relative few who read him), and for the censorship campaign against his novel Jurgen, which amounted to minor celebrity status. That Cabell would then contribute not a short story (and there are many he could have contributed), nor even an excerpt from a novel, but verse, and verse in the form of acrostics which are used to preface these novels ... well, that seems a bit surprising if Mr Burnett truly was a stickler for literally picking one's best writing and labeling it as such. At one point, Cabell even claims that writing verse is a young man's game, and anyone else writing verse is exhibiting signs of stunted mental growth. This was said tongue-in-cheek almost assuredly, but including verse as his selection of "his best" again illustrates the license he was given.

I don't have the volume or references in front of me but it seems Cabell was redefining "best" for his own purposes. He claimed that these acrostics were his writings that had "brought him the most pleasure" and so in that sense he regarded them as his 'best'. Cabell liked to be contrary.

I believe the entire book is available for free as a PDF online. Here's the link if y'all are interested.

http://www.flippedoutteaching.com/lessons/eng3/unit5/This%20is%20My%20Best.pdf

May take a while to download because it's 1188 pages.

I had a look around on archive.org last night - didn't find anything relevant to the original question, but did come across a facsimile of one of RPT Coffin's later collections Apples by Ocean (1950). All the poems that weren't about Maine seemed to be about young boys (in fact, quite a few were about both). All quite innocent, I'm sure - I think he was just a very proud grandfather - but these days he'd probably have the guardians of morality sniffing about his heels.

I have a copy of "Coast Calendar" by Robert Peter Tristram Coffin, published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., Indianapolis, New York Copyright 1947. 1949

Tristram Coffin born 1605 died in 1681 in Nantucket, my 9th great grandfather.