Antoine Godeau

Antoine Godeau (24 September 1605, Dreux – 21 April 1672, Vence) was a French bishop, poet and exegete. He is now known for his work of criticism Discours de la poésie chrétienne from 1633.

His verse-writing early won the interest of a relative in Paris, Valentin Conrart, at whose house the literary world gathered. The outcome of these meetings was the foundation of the Académie française, of which Godeau was one of the first members and the third whose lot it fell to deliver the weekly address to that body.

He was induced to settle in Paris, where he soon became a favorite at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, rivalling the famous writers of his period. At that time, to say of any work c'est de Godeau was to stamp it with the seal of approval. Perhaps best known among the works of his early days is his Discours sur les œuvres de Malherbe (1629), which shows some critical power and is valuable for the history of the French prose of the seventeenth century.

In 1636, he was named Bishop of Grasse by Richelieu, to whom he had dedicated his first religious composition, a poetical paraphrase of the Psalm Benedicite omnia opera Domini. He proved a model prelate. By a Bull of Pope Innocent X he was empowered to unite the Dioceses of Grasse and Vence under his administration, but seeing the dissatisfaction of the clergy of the latter diocese, he relinquished the former and established himself at Vence.

Godeau by no means gave up other interests. In 1645 and 1655 he took a prominent part in the General Assembly of the French Clergy, and under the regency of Anne of Austria was deputy from the Estates of Provence. He was stricken with apoplexy and died in his episcopal city at the age of sixty-seven.

He turned his talent for versification to religious uses, his best known productions being a metrical version of the Psalms, poems on St. Paul, the assumption, St. Eustace, Mary Magdalen, and one of 15,000 lines on the annals of the Church. The monotony and mechanical arrangement of the poems are relieved at intervals by passages remarkable for thought or expression, among others those lines embodied by Corneille in his Polyeucte:

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