Copeland, at 87, Preserves Unbowed Health and Political Individualism

"My health," observed Charles Townsend Copeland '82, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, emeritus, three years ago to an inquirer, "is as good as any man my age in the country." Marking his eighty-seventh birthday tomorrow, Professor Copeland can find no one to dispute the point any more.

Inevitably known as "Copey" despite feeble protests from time to time, he retired from active English teaching here in 1928, but to more than memories, Still an active and keen mind more concerned with the future than the past, the retired man of letters vigorously retains his "independent" status in politics.

This individualistic attitude, he now confesses, was more the achievement of youth than the revelation of his contemplative years. A non-Republican youth will always be a curiosity in his rock-ribbed town of Calais, Maine.

His name will always be linked through the years with the "triumvirate of American letters" at the turn of the century, the other two members being George Lyman Kittredge of his graduating class at Harvard, and now-deceased Bliss Perry, Francis Higginson Professor of English Literature.

Last year "Copey" came out of his semi-retirement to revive his famed Christmas readings with a serving of "Dinner at the Cratchitts" by Charles Dickens. When George Santayana '86 and Robert Benchley '12 heard it in their respective college days, it provoked them to diverse literary expression on the piece. The humorist was inspired to parody, and the philosopher to eulogy of Copeland as "an artist rather than a scholar."