Louis Osborne Coxe was an American poet born in 1918 in Manchester, New Hampshire and was educated at St. Paul's School in Concord. He took his B.A. from Princeton University in 1940 and subsequently served during World War II in the Naval Reserve. Discharged in 1946, he married and began teaching at his alma mater. He was Briggs-Copeland Fellow at Harvard from 1948-1949, and from 1949-1955, he taught at the University of Minnesota. Coxe then moved to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1956, where he remained (except for brief appointments at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and the University of Aix-Marseilles, France) until his death in 1993 from Alzheimer's disease.

Coxe's first book, The Sea Faring and Other Poems was published in 1947, which was followed by The Second Man and Other Poems eight years later, in 1955. His other publications include The Wilderness and Other Poems (1958); The Middle Passage (1960); The Last Hero and Other Poems (1965); Nikal Seyn, Decoration Day: A Poem and a Play (1966); Passage Selected Poems 1943-1978; and The North Well (1985). Coxe was the author also of three other plays and four nonfiction books.