Birthday: A working poet who joked, "I am my broker's keeper."

John Anthony Ciardi (1916-1986)

Poet, critic, author, translator, educator

Recipient, the Prix de Rome, 1956

One critic said, “"John Ciardi long has been the rare American who could walk into a bank, declare his occupation as 'poet,' and emerge with a mortgage." A tireless champion of poetry and writing, Ciardi was at home behind a mic and in front of a camera. He was a longtime teacher, holding posts at Kansas City, Harvard and Rutgers before taking a seven-year journey as poetry editor of Saturday Review (then edited by Norman Cousins, born this day in 1912).

To spend more time entertaining his kids, Ciardi took up children’s verse, then young adult fiction. He directed the Broad Loaf Writer’s Conference for seventeen years, then was fired for being too much a fogey for the age of the Beats and Black Mountain. He published a still-in-print translation of Dante (1964-70), and for the last decade of his life was a fixture on NPR Morning Edition, with his three-minute “Word in Your Ear” commentaries on etymology.

Related sites

The Poetry Foundation: John Ciardi

John Ciardi, 1971