Louis Coxe
Louis Osborne Coxe was an American poet, playwright, and educator, born on April 15, 1918, in Manchester, New Hampshire. He pursued his education at St. Paul's School and graduated from Princeton University in 1940 before serving in the Navy. Following his military service, Coxe taught English at various institutions, including Lawrenceville and the University of Minnesota, and eventually at Bowdoin College, where he served as the Pierce Professor of English until retirement. His literary contributions began with his first collection of poetry, "The Sea Faring, and Other Poems," published in 1947, and he gained further recognition for co-writing the stage adaptation of "Billy Budd." Known for his preference for traditional poetic forms and large themes, Coxe's works often reflected a "radically anti-modernist" style. Notable publications include "The Middle Passage," a narrative poem on the slave trade, and various critical essays. Throughout his career, Coxe was honored with awards, including the Donaldson Award for Drama. He passed away in 1993, leaving behind a legacy of significant literary contributions, with his works archived at Princeton University.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Louis Coxe
Nonfiction Writer, Poet and Playwright
- Born: April 15, 1918
- Birthplace: Manchester, New Hampshire
- Died: May 28, 1993
- Place of death: Augusta, Maine
Biography
Louis Osborne Coxe was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, on April 15, 1918. After being educated at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, graduating from Princeton University in 1940, and serving in the Navy, Coxe taught English at Lawrenceville, served as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow at Harvard University, and taught at the University of Minnesota until 1955. He married Edith Winsor in 1946; they had four children.
During this time, Coxe published The Sea Faring, and Other Poems (1947), his first collection of poetry. A play, Uniform of Flesh (1949), later became the dramatic adaptation Billy Budd (1951), which Coxe cowrote with his former Princeton classmate Robert H. Chapman. This adaptation itself was later adapted to be made into the movie version of Billy Budd; Coxe and Chapman received an on-screen credit for their original drama. In addition, Coxe won the Donaldson Award for Drama in 1952.
In 1955, Coxe published a second collection of poems, The Second Man. In the same year, he began teaching at Bowdoin College, where he was the Pierce Professor of English until his retirement, also spending two years as a Fulbright lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and at L’Université de Provence in Aix-Marseille. In his poetry, Coxe often preferred “large” subjects and the use of traditional forms, which may be why he referred to himself as “the first neo- Victorian.” For example, he published a book-length narrative poem on the slave trade, The Middle Passage (1960). His poetic style has therefore been called “radically anti-modernist.”
In other work, Coxe brought out a critical booklet in 1962, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and in 1976 published Enabling Acts: Selected Essays in Criticism. His Passage: Selected Poems 1943-1978 appeared in 1979, after Coxe had won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1977 and the Academy of American Poets prize in 1978; a more recent collection is The North Well: New Poems (1985). Princeton University maintains a special collection of Coxe’s correspondence and magazines in which his poems were originally published. Coxe died in 1993.