John Ciardi
From Philosopedia
Ciardi, John (24 June 1916 - 30 March 1986)
Ciardi, who was born in 1916 in Boston, Massachusetts, was the child of Italian immigrants. He attended Bates College and Tufts College (now University) and received his master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1939. He was the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, among them The Collected Poems of John Ciardi (University of Arkansas Press, 1997), The Birds of Pompeii (1985), The Little That Is All (1974), Person to Person (1964), and Other Skies (1947).
His How Does a Poem Mean? (1959) became a standard text for college and high school poetry courses. He also wrote an acclaimed translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, was a regular commentator on National Public Radio, and served as editor of Saturday Review for many years.
He began his career teaching English at the University of Kansas City, and, after serving a three-year term in the Air Force, went on to teach at Harvard University in 1946. He remained at Harvard as the Briggs-Copeland Instructor in English until 1953, when he accepted a position at Rutgers University.
A member of the Institute of Arts and Letters of the American Academy, Ciardi once proposed to The Humanist editor Priscilla Robertson that John Holmes be the magazine’s poetry editor. She appointed Holmes soon thereafter.
A personable man, Ciardi had a special way with words. Asked what gentility is, he replied,
- Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
He also once confided that of the various contemporary poets, he was one of the few who could afford a Cadillac.
Ciardi, an atheist, was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II.
Ciardi died of a heart attack in 1986. He previously had suggested an 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.
