John Ciardi

1916—1986
Author John Ciardi as He Appeared in the Atlantic Monthly
Photo by Bettmann / Getty Images

John Ciardi grew up in Boston. He studied at Bates College and Tufts University and earned an MA from the University of Michigan in 1939. He published over 40 books in his lifetime, including The Birds of Pompeii (University of Arkansas Press, 1985), The Little That Is All (Rutgers University Press, 1974), This Strangest Everything (Rutgers University Press, 1966), and his debut, Homeward to America (Henry Holt, 1940). Ciardi also translated Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, publishing The Inferno in 1954, The Purgatorio in 1961, and The Paradiso in 1970, all as part of ​the Mentor Classic series from the New American Library. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His other honors include the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award and the 1956 Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ciardi was strongly in favor of exposing poetry to mass audiences. Even so, as a critic, Ciardi was controversial for his frank reviews. Whatever his aspirations for a larger audience for poetry, he never shied away from critiquing what he considered unworthy verse. The first major instance of this involved his 1957 unfavorable review in Saturday Review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Unicorn. Such blunt criticism shocked readers and prompted a slew of mail in protestation, sent to Saturday Review where Ciardi served as poetry editor from 1956 to 1982. Ciardi defended his position in later issues of the magazine, arguing that a critic’s role is to examine the work itself, not the popularity of the artist.

A former member of the English faculties at Harvard University and Rutgers University, Ciardi broke with academia in 1961 to focus completely on his writing. Around this time, he turned to composing children’s poetry as a means of playing and reading with his children, culminating in I Met a Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1961).

Ciardi’s linguistic research yielded him a regular three-minute feature on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition called A Word in Your Ear, in which he reported on the history of words. This ultimately led to a multivolume work, A Browser’s Dictionary (HarperCollins, 1980) and A Second Browser’s Dictionary (HarperCollins, 1983).

Ciardi died in Edison, New Jersey, on March 30, 1986.

In 1987, HarperCollins published the final volume in Ciardi’s Browser’s Dictionary series, Good Words to You All. In 1997, the University of Arkansas Press published The Collected Poems of John Ciardi, compiled and edited by Edward M. Cifelli.