17 Facts About John Ciardi

John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and etymologist.

At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, John Ciardi had a network television program on CBS, Accent.

John Ciardi was born at home in Boston's North End in 1916.

John Ciardi entered Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, before transferring to Tufts University in Boston to study under poet John Holmes.

John Ciardi graduated from Tufts in 1938, and the following year completed his MA at the University of Michigan.

John Ciardi taught briefly at the University of Kansas City 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.

John Ciardi was discharged in October 1945 with the rank of Technical Sergeant and with both the Air Medal and Oak Leaf Cluster.

John Ciardi was a longtime resident of Metuchen, New Jersey.

John Ciardi died on Easter Sunday in 1986 of a heart attack, but not before composing his own epitaph:.

John Ciardi 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.

John Ciardi had begun translating Dante for his classes at Harvard and continued with the work throughout his time there.

John Ciardi was the poetry editor of the Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972.

In 1962 John Ciardi wrote an editorial critical of the government's efforts to censor Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which the book's publisher Barney Rosset, engaged in defense against legal action across the country, later acknowledged for its impact on public opinion, aiding the defense in the jury trials that followed.

John Ciardi is more like a very literate, gently appetitive, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond of deep simple things like his wife and kids, his friends and students, Dante's verse and good food and wine.

John Ciardi did not fare well in the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s.

John Ciardi 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.

John 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.