John Ciardi - Legacy

Legacy

Critic and poet Kenneth Rexroth described Ciardi as ". . . singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives and feuds. He 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." "During his years at Bread Loaf and at the Saturday Review, Ciardi established a reputation as a tough, sometimes harsh, critic." "His review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1956 book The Unicorn touched off what the Review's editor, Norman Cousins, described as the biggest storm of reader protest in the magazine's history." "Ciardi defended his stand, noting that it was the reviewer's duty to damn when warranted." In similar circumstances, Ciardi "described Robert Frost's ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ as expressing the death wish of its speaker". May Sarton, for example, accused Ciardi of "hat guts and everything he could to destroy " in describing the difficulties faced by women poets.

Working for The Saturday Review while overseas, Ciardi sent Harold Norse’s poem, "Victor Emmanuel Monument (Rome)," back to the U.S. to be published in the April 13,1957 issue . The poem described Italian soldiers as flamboyant prostitutes. In Ciardi's biography, Cifelli quotes several lines from the poem indicating that the soldiers were "all the brilliance of male panache," and "picking up extra cash from man and boy". Ciardi was asked to leave by Italian officials by June 16. Knowing that he could be arrested, he continued to write letters of apology to the government, asking for reprieve. Yet he refused to leave, as he was not scheduled to depart till later on in the summer.

Ciardi did not fare well during the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s. He 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. He urged his only remaining students, those at Bread Loaf for two weeks each August, to learn how to write within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of undisciplined, improvisational free verse. 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.

Over the past quarter century, John Ciardi has come to be regarded as a mid-level, mid-century formalist, one who was replaced in literary history by the more daring and colorful Beat, Confessional, and Black Mountain poets. However, with revisionism chipping away at the reputations of the latter groups, and the emergence of Dana Gioia and the New Formalists in the late 20th century, Ciardi's type of mostly understated verse, his work is much more culturally relevant than it once was.

In recognition of Ciardi's work, a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry is given annually to an Italian American poet for lifetime achievement in poetry.