John Ciardi - Biography

Biography

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) and his three older sisters, all of whom scrimped and saved until they had enough money to send him to college. In 1921, two years after his father was killed in an automobile accident, the family moved to Medford, Massachusetts, where the young Ciardi peddled vegetables to the neighbors and attended public schools." "Ciardi began his higher studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, but transferred to Tufts University in Boston, where he studied under the poet John Holmes." "He received his degree in 1938, and won a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he obtained his master's degree the next year and won the first of many awards for his poetry," e.g., the prestigious Hopwood Award in poetry.

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. 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 (who at the time was a journalist and journalism instructor). 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.

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:

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.