John Ciardi

Poet John Anthony Ciardi was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 24, 1916.

He graduated from Tufts University (then called Tufts College) in 1938 and got his M. A. from the University of Michigan the next year.

His first volume of poetry, "Homeward to America", was published in 1940, to critical acclaim.

He was an English instructor at the University of Kansas City from 1940-42, when he left to join the US Army Air Force during World War II.

After the war's end he returned to his teaching job, but in 1946 he moved back to Boston and taught at Harvard University.

He joined the faculty of Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1953, becoming a Professor of English there in 1956. In addition to his volumes of poetry he also wrote poems and verse for children, in addition to translating "The Inferno" of Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy".

In 1956 he became poetry editor of The Saturday Review.

World-famous poet, literary critic, and university professor, author of over forty volumes of literary criticism and poetry. Best known for his "How Does a Poem Mean?" (1959), which became a standard textbook for high school and college poetry courses.

He left his position at Rutgers in 1961 to pursue his writing career full time.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 179-181. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.