John Ciardi

At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent. Ciardi's impact on poetry is perhaps best measured through the younger poets whom he influenced as a teacher and as editor of the Saturday Review.

John Ciardi studied at University of Michigan, Tufts University and Bates College. The recorded working language is Italian and English. Employment is recorded with Rutgers University, Harvard University and University of Florida. Works named in the authority record are The Divine Comedy. Distinctions recorded are Rome Prize and Air Medal.

• Name — John Ciardi • Born — 24 June 1916 • Birthplace — Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. • Died — 30 March 1986 • Place of death — Metuchen, New Jersey, U.S. • Spouse — Judith Hostetter • Children — Three • Genre — Poet, etymologist • Notable Works — La Divina Commedia translation • Occupation — * Poet • teacher • etymologist • translator • Education — Bates College Tufts University (transferred) University of Michigan • Awards — Hopwood Award

Ciardi was born at home in Boston's North End in 1916. His father, an Italian immigrant, died in an automobile accident in 1919, and he was raised by his Italian mother (who was illiterate) and his three older sisters. In 1921, his family moved to Medford, Massachusetts, where he attended public schools. His family members saved enough money to send him to college. He entered Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, before transferring to Tufts University in Boston to study under poet John Holmes. He graduated from Tufts in 1938, and the following year completed his MA at the University of Michigan. At Michigan he was awarded the Hopwood Prize for Homeward to America, a poetry collection which he submitted under the pseudonym "Thomas Aquinas". Ciardi taught briefly at the University of Kansas City before joining the United States Army Air Forces 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, on July 28, married Myra Judith Hostetter, a journalist and journalism instructor. 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. John Ciardi was a longtime resident of Metuchen, New Jersey. He died on Easter Sunday in 1986 of a heart attack, 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.

After the war, Mr. Ciardi returned briefly to Kansas State, before being named instructor [in 1946], and later assistant professor, in the Briggs Copeland chair at Harvard University, where he stayed until 1953.... While at Harvard, Mr. Ciardi began his long association with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he lectured on poetry for almost 30 years, half that time as director of the program. Ciardi 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 poetry collection, Mid-Century American Poets, which 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 "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. Dudley Fitts, himself an important mid-century translator, said of Ciardi's version, "[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." Joan Acocella (née Ross), however, noted "The constant stretching for a heartier, more modern and American idiom not only vulgarizes; it also guarantees that wherever Dante expresses himself by implication rather than by direct statement, Ciardi will either miss or ignore the nuance." The translation "is widely used at universities." Ciardi's translation of The Purgatorio followed in 1961 and The Paradiso in 1970. Ciardi's version of The Inferno was recorded and released by Folkways Records in 1954. Two years later, Ciardi would have his work featured again on an album titled, As If: Poems, New and Selected, by John Ciardi. In 1953, Ciardi joined the English Department at Rutgers University in order to begin a writing program, but after eight successful years there, he resigned his professorship in 1961 in favor of several other more lucrative careers, especially fall and spring tours on the college lecture circuit, and to "devote himself fulltime to literary pursuits." (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 on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He was the poetry editor of the Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972. In 1962 Ciardi wrote an editorial critical of the government's efforts to censor Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which the book's publisher Barney Rosset, engaged in defense against legal action across the country, later acknowledged for its impact on public opinion, aiding the defense in the jury trials that followed. He wrote the 1959 poetry textbook How Does a Poem Mean? Ciardi was a "fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member and former president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters." He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. For the last decade of his life, he reported on word histories on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, as an outgrowth of his series of books of etymologies, A Browser's Dictionary (1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary (1983) and Good Words to You (posthumously published in 1987). The weekly three-minute spot on etymology was called Word In Your Ear. He also taught at the University of Florida. Among 20th-century American men of letters, he maintained a notably high profile and level of popularity with the general public, as well as a reputation for considerable craftsmanship in his output. Burton Raffel summed up Ciardi's career: "Blessed with a fine voice, a ready wit, and a relentless honesty, Ciardi became in many ways an archetype of the existentially successful twentieth-century American poet, peripatetic, able to fit into and exploit chinks in the great American scheme of things, while never fitting in as either a recognized peg or hole."

He was employed by Rutgers University, Harvard University, University of Florida, Kansas State University and University of Missouri–Kansas City. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Letters.