COPPÉE, FRANÇOIS-ÉDOUARD-JOACHIM. - French poet, b. in Paris on 12 Jan. 1842, d. there on 23 Jan. 1908. A member of the Académie française from 18 Dec. 1884. At first a contributor to the Parnasse, a literary journal of classicizing tendency, C., endowed with exquisite sensibility and with facility in versification, yet always sustained by a vigilant sense of artistic dignity, oriented himself decisively toward poetry of an intimate subject. He thus became the best known and most acclaimed exponent of a genre that had already attracted Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and De Maistre, not without reviving, in some lyrics, inspirations of a warmer tone, which call to mind Baudelaire, although C.'s moral world was able to remain altogether healthier and more elevated.
In 1868 he published the verses of the Intimités, in 1872 Les humbles, a collection of sketches and subjective lyrical effusions. There followed the Arrière-saison (1887), perhaps his best collection of verse, certainly the most widespread and imitated in Italy (L. Stecchetti) and in France (F. Jammes).
C.'s theatrical productions are numerous, and some of them notable: Le Passant (1869), a one-act comedy in verse, set in Renaissance Florence, later adapted by G. Targioni-Tozzetti and G. Menasci into a melodrama (Zanetto, music by P. Mascagni); Le Luthier de Crémone (1876); Severo Torelli (1883), a drama in 5 acts in verse set in Pisa in 1494 (translated by E. Panzacchi); Le Pater (1890), a drama whose performance was forbidden by ministerial measures in 1889; Pour la couronne (1895), another drama in 5 acts set in the Balkans, etc.
The long travail of C.'s spirit, directed toward the search for God through the changing appearances of the contingent world and the dissatisfaction that earthly pleasure leaves behind, found choice expression in the moving pages of La bonne souffrance (1898), a justly famous testimony of his return to Catholic practice, and, with this prose work, which is also artistically his best, C., who had already pointed to Esmenard, Lebrun, and Chenodollé as his preferred authors, entered into the ranks of the writers of the great spiritualist current to which Brunetière, Huysmans, and Joergensen are linked.
Works: Very useful for C.'s biography are the Lettres à sa mère et à sa soeur (1869-73) published by J. Monval in the Revue des deux mondes, 8 (15 July 1911), pp. 376-404, and those to the same (1862-1908), edited by the same from J. Lemerre (Paris 1914). The complete edition of the Works, in 4 vols. in 8°, with illustrations by De Styrbech and Robaudi, came out in Paris s. d. from the same publisher.
Bibliography10 works
Maria Sabucchi