John Ciardi

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John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator, and etymologist.

John Ciardi was one of the most versatile and accomplished literary figures of his generation. Primarily a poet, often an exceptionally fine one, he was also a highly regarded translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, a prolific and award-winning children's poet, a distinguished etymologist, a controversial columnist and poetry editor at Saturday Review, and a no-nonsense director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. In 1959, Ciardi published a seminally important book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?. At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent, and for the last decade of his life, he reported on word histories on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, an additional outlet for his series of very popular books of etymologies, A Browser's Dictionary (1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary (1983) and Good Words to You (posthumously published in 1987). Very few literary figures of his or any generation matched Ciardi's high-profile popularity and high-quality literary production. He was uniquely talented.

Ciardi was born at home in Boston's Little Italy. After the death of his father in 1919, he was raised by his Italian mother (who was illiterate in both English and Italian) and his three older sisters, all of whom scrimped and saved until they had enough money to send him to college, first at Bates and then Tufts where he graduated in 1938. The next year he took an M.A. and the prestigious Hopwood Award in poetry at the University of Michigan. He taught for a couple of years at the University of Kansas City before joining the United States Army Air Corps in 1942, becoming a gunner on B-29s and flying some twenty missions over Japan before being transferred to desk duty in 1945. He was discharged in October 1945 with the rank of Technical Sergeant and with both the Air Medal and Oak Leaf Cluster. Ciardi's war diary, Saipan, was published posthumously in 1988.

After the war, Ciardi returned to UKC for the spring semester 1946, where he met and married Myra Judith Hostetter on July 28. Immediately after the wedding, the couple left for a third-floor apartment at Ciardi's Medford, Massachusetts home, which his mother and sisters had put together for the man of their family and his new bride. Ciardi began teaching at Harvard that September and remained there for the next seven years. He had published his first book of poems, Homeward to America, in 1940, before the war, and his next book, Other Skies, focusing on his wartime experiences, was published in 1947. His third book, Live Another Day, came out in 1949. In 1950, Ciardi edited a landmark poetry collection, Mid-Century American Poets, which presciently identified the best poets of the generation that had come into its own in the 1940s: Richard Wilbur, Muriel Rukeyser, John Frederick Nims, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Ciardi himself, and several others. Each poet selected several poems for inclusion, plus his or her comments on the poetic principles that guided the compositions, addressing especially the issue of the so-called "unintelligibility" of modern poetry.

Ciardi had begun translating Dante for his classes at Harvard and continued with the work throughout his time there. His translation of The Inferno was published in 1954 and was widely and highly praised. Dudley Fitts, himself an important mid-century translator, said of Ciardi's Inferno, "[H]ere is our Dante, Dante for the first time translated into virile, tense American verse; a work of enormous erudition which (like its original) never forgets to be poetry; a shining event in a bad age." Ciardi's translation of The Purgatorio followed in 1961 and The Paradiso in 1970.

In 1953, Ciardi joined the English Department at Rutgers University to begin a writing program, but after eight successful years there, he resigned his professorship in favor of several other more lucrative careers, especially fall and spring tours on the college lecture circuit. (When he left Rutgers, he famously quipped that teaching was "planned poverty.") He was popular enough and interesting enough to warrant a pair of appearances in the early 1960s with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

Ciardi did not fare well, however, during the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s. He had been a fresh, sometimes brash, voice for modern poetry, but as he approached his fiftieth birthday in 1966, he had become entrenched and his voice became bitter, sometimes bumptious. He urged his only remaining students, those at Bread Loaf for two weeks each August, to learn how to write within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of undisciplined, improvisational free verse. It was sensible advice for an age that had lost faith in its elders. Ciardi was unceremoniously fired from Bread Loaf in 1972, after serving seventeen years as director, and not having missed a single year on the poetry staff since 1947.

Over the past quarter century, John Ciardi has come to be regarded as a mid-level, mid-century formalist, one who was replaced in literary history by the more daring and colorful Beat, Confessional, and Black Mountain poets. However, with revisionism chipping away at the reputations of the latter groups, and the emergence of Dana Gioia and the New Formalists in the late twentieth century, Ciardi's type of mostly understated verse, what he praised as the Unimportant Poem, reads much better than it has in many years. His best poems in collections like his verse autobiography, Lives of X (1971) or the opening sequence of bird poems in Person to Person (1964), or several of his love poems in I Marry You (1958) or the many Italian American poems that are sprinkled throughout his Collected Poems (1997)--all have a quietly assertive voice that pleases.

John Ciardi died on Easter Sunday in 1986 of a heart attack at his home in Metuchen, New Jersey, but not before composing his own epitaph:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

[edit] On Words

NPR continues to make Ciardi's commentaries available. Etymologies and commentary on words such as daisy, demijohn, jimmies, gerrymander, glitch, snafu, cretin, and baseball, among others, are available from the archives of NPR's website.

NPR also began making his commentaries available as podcasts, starting in November 2005.

[edit] Bibliography

Homeward to America, 1940. Poems.
Other Skies, 1947. Poems.
Live Another Day, 1949. Poems.
Mid-Century American Poems, 1950. Anthology edited by Ciardi.
From Time to Time, 1951. Poems.
"The Hypnoglyph", 1953. Short story in Fantasy & Science Fiction, using the pseudonym "John Anthony."
The Inferno. 1954. Translation.
As If: Poems New and Selected, 1955.
I Marry You, 1958. Poems.
39 Poems, 1959.
The Reason for the Pelican, 1959. Children's poems.
How Does a Poem Mean? 1959. Poetry textbook.
Scrappy the Pup, 1960. Children's poems.
In the Stoneworks, 1961. Poems.
The Purgatorio, 1961. Translation.
I Met a Man, 1961. Children's poems.
The Man Who Sang the Sillies, 1961. Children's poems.
In Fact, 1962. Poems.
The Wish-Tree, 1962. Children's story.
You Read to Me, I'll Read to You, 1962. Children's poems.
Dialogue with an Audience, 1963. Saturday Review controversies and other selected essays.
John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan, 1963. Children's poems.
Person to Person, 1964. Poems.
You Know Who, 1964. Children's poems.
The King Who Saved Himself from Being Saved, 1966. Children's story in verse.
This Strangest Everything, 1966. Poems.
The Monster Den, 1966. Children's poems.
An Alphabestiary, 1967. Poems.
The Paradiso, 1970. Translation.
Someone Could Win a Polar Bear, 1970. Children's poems.
Lives of X, 1971. Verse autobiography.
Manner of Speaking, 1972. Saturday Review columns.
The Little That Is All, 1974. Poems.
Fast & Slow, 1975. Children's poems.
The Divine Comedy, 1977. All three sections published together.
Limericks Too Gross, 1978. With Isaac Asimov.
For Instance, 1979. Poems.
A Browser's Dictionary, 1980. Etymology.
A Grossery of Limericks, 1981. With Isaac Asimov.
A Second Browser's Dictionary, 1983. Etymology.
Selected Poems, 1984.
The Birds of Pompeii, 1985. Poems.
Doodle Soup, 1985. Children's poems.
Good Words to You, 1987. Etymology.
Poems of Love and Marriage, 1988.
Saipan: The War Diary of John Ciardi, 1988.
Blabberhead, Bobble-Bud & Spade, 1988. Collection of children's poems.
Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry, 1989.
Echoes: Poems Left Behind, 1989.
The Hopeful Trout and Other Limericks, 1989. Children's poems.
Mummy Took Lessons and Other Poems, 1990. Children's poems.
Stations of the Air, 1993. Poems.
The Collected Poems of John Ciardi, 1997. Edited by Edward M. Cifelli.