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1916-1986 poet, commentator,
editor and academician John Ciardi was
born in 1916 in Boston, Massachusetts, the child of Italian immigrants. He
attended He is 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). Ciardi
is perhaps best known for How Does a Poem Mean? (1959), which 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 In 1961, Ciardi broke with the educational establishment to devote himself to his own literary endeavors, although he remained an active and visible member of the academic community through lectures, poetry readings, and appearances on educational television. He began writing children's poetry as a way of getting his own children interested in reading. These works, especially I Met a Man Who Sang the Sillies (1961), became tremendously popular. Ciardi was a vocal proponent of exposing poetry to mass audiences, and he made a conscientious effort to address the average reader through much of his work without sacrificing complexity or formal intricacy. His verse, which often eschewed contemporary poetic trends and the "elevated" themes Ciardi associated with romantic and sentimental sensibilities, gained a large public following. Ciardi's awards and honors include a grant from The Fund
for the Advancement of Education and the Prix de Rome from The American
Academy of Arts and Letters. He died of a heart attack in 1986 in 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. Source:
www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=697 |
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John Ciardi [