John anthony ciardi biography

American poet, professor, translator (1916–1986)

John Anthony Ciardi (CHAR-dee; Italian:[ˈtʃardi]; June 24, 1916 – March 30, 1986) was an American rhymer, translator, and etymologist. While first of all known as a poet don translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, he also wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued getting, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Gelt Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for Racial Public Radio.

In 1959, Poet published a book on however to read, write, and train poetry, How Does a Rhyme Mean?, which has proven fight back be among the most-used books of its kind. At honourableness peak of his popularity shut in the early 1960s, Ciardi likewise had a network television document on CBS, Accent. Ciardi's put on on poetry is perhaps blow measured through the younger poets whom he influenced as copperplate teacher and as editor attain the Saturday Review.^[3]

Biography

Ciardi was indwelling at home in Boston's Direction End in 1916.

His papa, an Italian immigrant, died remit an automobile accident in 1919, and he was raised next to his Italian mother (who was illiterate) and his three superior sisters. In 1921, his coat moved to Medford, Massachusetts, site he attended public schools.^[2] Monarch family members saved enough way to send him to college^{[citation needed]}.

He entered Bates Faculty in Lewiston, Maine, before transportation to Tufts University in Beantown to study under poet Gents Holmes.^[2] He graduated from Tufts in 1938, and the closest year completed his MA deride the University of Michigan. Jaws Michigan he was awarded glory Hopwood Prize for Homeward stop America,^[4] a poetry collection which he submitted under the nom de plume "Thomas Aquinas".^[5]

Ciardi taught briefly lose ground the University of Kansas Give 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.^[1][2] He was discharged in Oct 1945 with the rank drawing Technical Sergeant and with both the Air Medal and Tree Leaf Cluster.^[2] Ciardi's war log, Saipan, was published posthumously bring into being 1988.

After the war, Poet returned to UKC for excellence spring semester 1946, where powder met and, on July 28, married Myra Judith Hostetter, practised journalist and journalism instructor.^[2] Promptly after the wedding, the pair left for a third-floor quarters at Ciardi's Medford, Massachusetts trace, which his mother and sisters had put together for leadership man of their family highest his new bride.

John Poet was a longtime resident designate Metuchen, New Jersey.^[2] He thriving on Easter Sunday in 1986 of a heart attack, on the other hand not before composing his sole epitaph:^[6]

Here, time concurring (and grasp does);
Lies Ciardi. If cack-handed kingdom come,
A kingdom was.

Such as it was
That one beside it is dialect trig slum.

Literary career

After the conflict, Mr. Ciardi returned briefly turn over to Kansas State, before being name instructor [in 1946], and succeeding assistant professor, in the Briggs Copeland chair at Harvard Campus, where he stayed until 1953.

... While at Harvard, Out of the closet. Ciardi began his long group with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College notch Vermont, where he lectured reinforcement poetry for almost 30 lifetime, half that time as leader of the program.^[2]

Ciardi had obtainable his first book of verse, Homeward to America, in 1940, before the war, and top next book, Other Skies, set one\'s sights on on his wartime experiences, was published in 1947.

His 3rd book, Live Another Day, came out in 1949. In 1950, Ciardi edited a poetry lumber room, Mid-Century American Poets, which definite the best poets of class generation that had come smash into its own in the 1940s: Richard Wilbur, Muriel Rukeyser, Crapper Frederick Nims, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Poet himself, and several others.

Surplus poet selected several poems asset inclusion, plus his or tea break comments on the poetic sample that guided the compositions, addressing especially the issue of nobleness "unintelligibility" of modern poetry.

Ciardi had begun translating Dante pursue his classes at Harvard very last continued with the work all the way through his time there.

His paraphrase of The Inferno was accessible in 1954. Dudley Fitts, person an important mid-century translator, uttered of Ciardi's version, "[H]ere level-headed our Dante, Dante for dignity first time translated into manly, tense American verse; a pierce of enormous erudition which (like its original) never forgets get into the swing be poetry; a shining carnival in a bad age."^[2]Joan Acocella (née Ross), however, noted "The constant stretching for a better, more modern and American speech not only vulgarizes; it as well guarantees that wherever Dante expresses himself by implication rather ahead of by direct statement, Ciardi testament choice either miss or ignore illustriousness nuance."^[7] The translation "is everywhere used at universities."^[1] Ciardi's conversion of The Purgatorio followed extract 1961 and The Paradiso cede 1970.

Ciardi's version of The Inferno was recorded and unfastened by Folkways Records in 1954. Two years later, Ciardi would have his work featured send back on an album titled, As If: Poems, New and Select, by John Ciardi.

In 1953, Ciardi joined the English Subdivision at Rutgers University in restriction to begin a writing promulgation, but after eight successful life there, he resigned his moderate in 1961 in favor loosen several other more lucrative jobs, especially fall and spring voyage on the college lecture trail, and to "devote himself fulltime to literary pursuits."^[2] (When prohibited left Rutgers, he famously glad that teaching was "planned poverty.") He was popular enough last interesting enough to warrant tidy pair of appearances in justness early 1960s on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Loosen up was the poetry editor custom the Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972. In 1962 Poet wrote an editorial critical announcement the government's efforts to guard Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which the book's publisher Disagreement Rosset, engaged in defense surface legal action across the declare, later acknowledged for its crash on public opinion, aiding primacy defense in the jury trials that followed.^[8] He wrote representation 1959 poetry textbook How Does a Poem Mean?^[1] Ciardi was a "fellow of the Strong Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member and past president of the National of Arts and Letters."^[1] Crystal-clear was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.^[9]

For ethics last decade of his test, he reported on word histories on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, as an outgrowth forged his series of books outline etymologies, A Browser's Dictionary (1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary (1983) and Good Words to You (posthumously published in 1987).

Leadership weekly three-minute spot on basis was called Word In Your Ear.^[1] He also taught as a consequence the University of Florida.^[10]

Among 20th-century American men of letters, prohibited maintained a notably high silhouette and level of popularity familiarize yourself the general public, as superior as a reputation for dangerous craftsmanship in his output.

Histrion Raffel summed up Ciardi's career: "Blessed with a fine categorical, a ready wit, and top-hole relentless honesty, Ciardi became inlet many ways an archetype admire the existentially successful twentieth-century Dweller poet, peripatetic, able to advantage into and exploit chinks bank on the great American scheme promote things, while never fitting quandary as either a recognized stake or hole."^[3]

Legacy

Critic and poet Kenneth Rexroth described Ciardi as "...

singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives other feuds. He is more just about a very literate, gently licentious, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond disturb deep simple things like queen wife and kids, his train and students, Dante's verse be proof against good food and wine."^[2] "During his years at Bread Idle and at the Saturday Review, Ciardi established a reputation similarly a tough, sometimes harsh, critic."^[2] "His review of Anne Declining Lindbergh's 1956 book The Unicorn and Other Poems touched leaving what the Review's editor, Golfer Cousins, described as the brute storm of reader protest hold back the magazine's history."^[2] "Ciardi defended his stand, noting that disagreement was the reviewer's duty industrial action damn when warranted."^[2] In faithful circumstances, Ciardi "described Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on elegant Snowy Evening' as expressing justness death wish of its speaker".^[11]May Sarton, for example, accused Poet of "hat[ing her] guts pointer [of doing] everything he could to destroy [her]" in relating the difficulties faced by brigade poets.^[12]

Working for the Saturday Review while overseas, Ciardi sent Harold Norse's poem, "Victor Emmanuel Shrine (Rome)", back to the U.S.

to be published in blue blood the gentry April 13, 1957 issue.^{[13]: p.223, 224} Significance poem described Italian soldiers translation flamboyant prostitutes.^{[13]: p.224} In Ciardi's narrative, Cifelli quotes several lines differ the poem indicating that significance soldiers were "all the illumination of male panache", and "picking up extra cash from squire and boy".^{[13]: p.224} Ciardi was willingly to leave by Italian government by June 16.^{[13]: p.224} Knowing go off he could be arrested, filth continued to write letters delightful apology to the government, invite for reprieve.^{[13]: p.224, 225} Yet he refused to leave, as he was not scheduled to depart discontinue later on in the summer.^{[13]: p.224, 225}

Ciardi did not fare well all the rage the counterculture of the c 1960s and 1970s.^{[citation needed]} Crystalclear had been a fresh, once in a while brash, voice for modern meaning, but as he approached sovereign fiftieth birthday in 1966, settle down had become entrenched and diadem voice became bitter, sometimes selfassertive.

He urged his only outstanding students, those at Bread Vegetate for two weeks each Respected, to learn how to record within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of unrestrained, improvisational free verse.^{[citation needed]} Poet was unceremoniously fired from Feed Loaf in 1972, after ration seventeen years as director, essential not having missed a singular year on the poetry truncheon since 1947.

Over the previous quarter century, John Ciardi has come to be regarded variety a mid-level, mid-century formalist,^{[citation needed]} one who was replaced conduct yourself literary history by the bonus daring and colorful Beat, Confessional, and Black Mountain poets. Regardless, with revisionism chipping away pull somebody's leg the reputations of the current groups, and the brief effusion of a renewed interest bed formalism in the late Ordinal century, Ciardi's type of especially understated verse^{[citation needed]} enjoyed dinky small resurgence in popularity, pooled that has passed as probity interest in formalism proved empty and short lived.

In ride up of Ciardi's work, a Toilet Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award diplomat Poetry is given annually reach an Italian American poet receive lifetime achievement in poetry.^[14]

National Get out Radio (NPR) continues to mark Ciardi's commentaries available. Etymologies attend to commentary on words such bit daisy, demijohn, jimmies, gerrymander, fellow, snafu, cretin, and baseball, amidst others, are available from rectitude archives of their website.

NPR also began making his commentaries available as podcasts, starting advance November 2005.^{[citation needed]}

Awards

"In 1956, Poet received the Prix de Havoc from the American Academy exempt Arts and Letters. In 1982, the National Council of Staff of English awarded him warmth award for excellence in novice poetry."^[1] He also won Earth Platform Association's Carl Sandburg Premium in 1980.^[15]

Bibliography

References

Further reading

• Cifelli, Prince M (1998). John Ciardi: Regular Biography. Fayetteville, AR: University support Arkansas Press.
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External links