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John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. John Ciardi was primarily a poet, but he also translated Dante's Divine Comedy , wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, and directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its kind. At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent. 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). 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. 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 College and then Tufts University 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 briefly 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 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 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. 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." Ciardi's translation of The Purgatorio followed in 1961 and The Paradiso in 1970. 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 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 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:
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