John (Anthony) Ciardi - On Words, Bibliography, External Links

Poet, writer, and teacher, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He attended Bates College (1934–6), Tufts (1938 BA), and the University of Michigan (1939 MA). He taught at many institutions, was director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Vermont (1956–72), and was poetry editor of the Saturday Review (1956–72). Based in Metuchen, NJ in his later years, he was known as a lecturer and etymologist as well as for his poetry and translations.

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. 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).

Ciardi was born in Boston's Little Italy.

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. 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.

Ciardi had begun translating Dante for his classes at Harvard and continued with the work throughout his time there. 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; 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 Counter Culture movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. 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. Cifelli

He died on Easter Sunday in 1986 of a heart attack in New Jersey, but not before composing his own epitaph:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi.

On Words

NPR continues to make his commentaries available.

Bibliography

The following is a partial bibliography:

A Browser's Dictionary (reissued ISBN 1-888173-20-3) A Second Browser's Dictionary (reissued ISBN 1-888173-34-3) A Third Browser's Dictionary (reissued ISBN 1-888173-43-2) The Collected Poems of John Ciardi, (published posthumously, ISBN 1-55728-450-4) Good Words to You: An All-New Dictionary and Native's Guide to the Unknown American Language, (ISBN 0-06-015691-0) How Does a Poem Mean?, (ISBN 0-395-18605-6) His translation of The Inferno (ISBN 0-451-52798-4) Limericks (with Isaac Asimov, ISBN 0-517-20882-2) Man Who Sang the Sillies (reissued ISBN 0-397-30568-0) You Read to Me, I'll Read to You, (illustrated by Edward Gorey, ISBN 0-06-446060-6)

Biography: John Ciardi: A Biography (The University of Arkansas Press, 1997) by Edward M. Cifelli, ISBN 1-55728-539-X

External Links

John Ciardi biography and example of his poetry.