Philip Booth; poetry and Maine were the core of his life; at 81

"Whatever the imagery of my poems," Philip Booth wrote in an autobiographical sketch, "my sense of language is rooted in metaphors native to Maine-talk, where each word counts."

Mr. Booth inspired generations of writing students and pursued a poetic ambition that cut a singular path.

"One thing about Philip that always astonishes me was how indifferent he was to the pecking order in poetry," said Richard Wilbur of Cummington, a longtime friend and former US poet laureate who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. "He was altogether his own man, really, and his poetry is the poetry of someone who is his own man."

Known for poems such as "Eaton's Boatyard" that celebrate the rectitude of life along the Maine coast, Mr. Booth also explored the contours of his soul, never flinching when the route was shrouded in darkness. He died July 2 in Hanover, N.H., of complications from Alzheimer's disease. Mr. Booth was 81 and had lived in Hanover, the town of his birth, and in Castine, Maine, which his ancestors had called home since 1797.

"Even though Dad wrote a lot about Maine, his poetry was increasingly over the course of his lifetime more about Maine, as one place in the larger community that is earth, and our connections to one another around the globe," said his daughter Margot Booth of Austin, Texas. "I do think that Castine anchored him in lots of ways. His love of Castine, the people and the place, were lifelines to him all of his days."

Writing most of the poems for the first of his several books while living in Lincoln and teaching at Wellesley College, Mr. Booth invoked the presence of Henry David Thoreau, the title poem an homage in part to a passage from "Walden." In "Letter From a Distant Land," he began: Henry, my distant kin, I live halfway, halfway between an airfield and your pond.

Years later, in "Lines From an Orchard Once Surveyed by Thoreau," Mr. Booth opened with a credo he shared through literary lineage. I've lived by the world's rules long enough. That season is over.

Ever his own man, Mr. Booth decided early on that poetry readings filched too much time from writing. Shying from the stage made him at once less available to a wider audience and more attractive to readers who saw in him a kindred spirit.

"There's no doubt that if he had decided to be a more public man his work would have gotten around more," said Stephen Dunn, who was a student of Mr. Booth's at Syracuse University and was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer for poetry. "He was a very exacting man, full of great precisions and a kind of Puritan passion."

Mr. Booth's father taught literature at Dartmouth College when the poet Robert Frost was a humanities fellow. Frost became a mentor to the writer, even mailing one of his books of poetry to Mr. Booth when he was stationed in Georgia during World War II.

In Georgia, Mr. Booth met Margaret Tillman, a pianist from Statesboro who gave a recital for the troops. They married in 1946, and he returned to study at Dartmouth.

Reading Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" during a week spent harvesting in an orchard, Mr. Booth had an epiphany when his eyes chanced upon a line with the image of instep arches aching from perching on ladder rungs.

"And it suddenly occurred to me that poets could tell the truth! I was hooked on that realization," he told the Island Journal, a publication of the Island Institute, a Maine community development organization.

While at Dartmouth, he wrote in the autobiographical sketch, his mother suffered the first in a series of breakdowns that ended with her death in a psychiatric hospital. "I fell out of Eden," he wrote.

Later he told the Island Journal: "There's a realm of darkness in all of us . . . which, being part of our lives, seems to me worth exploring."

Mr. Booth graduated from Dartmouth, received a master's degree from Columbia University, and taught at Bowdoin College and Dartmouth while finding his footing as a writer.

Attempting a novel decided his course. "I realized I was not a fiction writer," he said in the Island Journal interview. "I was a word man."

Teaching writing at Dartmouth led to the faculty appointment at Wellesley. Mr. Booth, his wife, and three daughters lived in Massachusetts for several years and moved in 1961 to Syracuse University, where he cofounded the creative writing program.

"I was impressed always by how he was a devoted teacher of undergraduate poets," Wilbur said. "In his solicitude for his students, he was far more involved than most teachers of writing are. I think a lot of poets who teach so-called creative writing are just doing it because they have to do something besides write poetry."

Nevertheless, poetry and Maine remained the core of his life. Castine became one of the most literary villages in the country when Mr. Booth's neighbors included the writers Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, known as Cal to his friends.

"He and my husband, Robert Lowell, were quite close, and they walked down to the docks and went out in boats," Hardwick said. "My husband wasn't very good at that sort of thing, as you can imagine, but Philip was very good with boats."

"I'm continually knocked over by the intensity of Cal's intelligence," Mr. Booth wrote in a journal passage quoted in the Lowell biography "Lost Puritan" by Paul Mariani. "But Cal wants to hear the Maine voice in which I tell stories, or he wants to be taken sailing."

"He had a very nice Maine accent," Mr. Booth's wife said. "Philip was a great storyteller, especially of Maine stories. He would often at a dinner party get a request for a certain Maine story."

The Booths retired in the 1990s to their Greek Revival house in Castine, where his study looked out over rooftops and weather vanes.

"He was in heaven," his wife said. "It was like somebody sitting, looking out at the vast acres of their estate and thinking, 'All's right with the world.' "

In 1999, Mr. Booth published "Lifelines," poems selected from a half-century of work. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's that year and moved with his wife to Hanover in 2002.

"Being a poet is not a career, it's a life," he wrote in a notebook entry that was published by the journal Ploughshares. "Writing poems is not a career but a lifetime of looking into, and listening to, how words see."

"He had a restraint born of his intensity and passion for living," his daughter said. "I really don't know many people who lived the way he lived. Behind my Dad's decorum and formality, there was always a feeling, to me, that he was about to burst at the seams. There was just an intensity to the way he felt things."

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Booth leaves two other daughters, Carol of Amherst and Robin of Rowe; a sister, Lee Klunder of Hartland, Vt.; and seven grandchildren.

A memorial service in Castine, Maine, will be announced at a later date.