John Ciardi
John Ciardi
John Anthony Ciardiwas an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet, he also translated Dante's Divine Comedy, wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, and directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDramatist
Date of Birth24 June 1916
But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them.
There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.
Bah! You asked for it. This is your life. The price is right enough. You've got no secrets. People are . . . well, never mind. But tell me, boys and girls and Federal gentlemen, has anyone had time to think of Khrushchev lately?
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
It's not a how-to-do-it school but more nearly a confessional in which people who have spent their lives at the writing process itemize their failures while clinging to their hopes.
A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.
Boys are the cash of war.
The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.