COPPÉE, François-Edouard-Joachim. - French poet, born in Paris on 12 January 1842, died there on 23 January 1908. Member of the Académie française from 18 December 1884. Initially a contributor to the Parnasse, a literary journal of classicist orientation, Coppée, endowed with exquisite sensitivity and ease in versification—always sustained by a vigilant sense of artistic dignity—firmly turned toward poetry of an intimate subject matter. He thus became the most renowned and acclaimed exponent of a genre that had already attracted Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and De Maistre, without, however, lacking in some lyrics a warmer tone that recalls Baudelaire, though Coppée’s moral world remained decidedly more wholesome and elevated.
In 1868 he published the verses of *Intimités*, in 1872 *Les humbles*, a collection of sketches and subjective lyrical effusions. This was followed by *Arrête-saison* (1887), perhaps his finest collection of verse, certainly the most widely circulated and imitated in Italy (L. Stecchetti) and in France (F. Jammes).
Coppée produced numerous theatrical works, as well as some short stories: *Le Passant* (1869), a one-act verse comedy set in Renaissance Florence, later adapted by G. Targioni-Tozzetti and G. Menasci into the melodrama *Zanetto* (music by P. Mascagni); *Le Luthier de Crémone* (1876); *Severo Torelli* (1883), a five-act verse drama set in Pisa in 1494 (translated by E. Panzacchi); *Le Pater* (1890), a drama whose performance was prohibited by ministerial decree in 1889; *Pour la couronne* (1895), another five-act drama set in the Balkans, etc.
The long spiritual struggle of Coppée, directed toward the search for God through the mutable appearances of the contingent world and the dissatisfaction left by earthly pleasure, found lofty expression in the commissioned pages of *La bonne souffrance* (1898), a rightly famous testimony to his return to Catholic practice. With this prose work, which is also artistically his finest, Coppée—who had already pointed to Esmenard, Lebrun, and Chenodolé as his preferred authors—joined the ranks of writers of the great spiritualist current to which Brunetière, Huysmans, and Jorgensen belong.
Works: For Coppée’s biography, very useful are the *Lettres à sa mère et à sa soeur* (1869–73), published by J. Monval in *Revue des deux mondes*, 8 (15 July 1911), pp. 376–404, and those to the same (1862–1908), edited by the same scholar for J. Lemerre (Paris 1914). The complete edition of his *Works*, in 4 volumes in-80, with illustrations by De Strybech and Robaudi, was published in Paris, undated, by the same publisher.