Arts and Letters

John Ciardi was one of the first real poets I ever met. After World War II, in which he had served as an aerial gunner, he went to Harvard to be a Briggs-Copeland instructor in English. I turned up there in the same year of 1946, to be at first a graduate student, and, later, John's colleague in the English faculty. John was thirty when we met, five years older than I, and was already a well-known and much-published poet. But he didn't lord it over me, and we were friends at once, beginning a never-finished conversation about words and poetry, and a forty-year anagrams competition, the last bouts of which took place this year in our adjoining Key West houses.

Cambridge, in the latter forties and early fifties, was experiencing what literary historians would call a poetic ferment. There were many poets about, too many to name, and they gathered in small evening groups to read their poems aloud and fish for praise. There was much excitement about poetic drama, and verse-plays old and new were presented in lofts and parish-houses and on college stages. The poetry reading, a form of concert which had once given pleasure only if the poet were of Robert Frost's magnitude, suddenly became so popular that anyone who had published a book, or a few poems in Accent or the Atlantic, could draw a crowd. And these new crowds wanted not only to hear poetry but also to hear about it in endless symposia. John Ciardi was a part of all this, as was I; and for several summers, furthermore, we lectured about poetry on alternate days at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. John's difference from the rest of us was that from any lectern, or on any stage, he spoke in a fine strong voice, challenging and amusing his hearers, never referring to notes, thinking on his feet, drawing on his exceptional memory for quotations and instances. He was, from the first, a natural performer.

John was esteemed at Harvard, and had his close associations there, but it was never his ambition to blend into the Yard or the Square. He lived his own life over in Medford, where he wrote poems for half or all of every night. One evening, when John and Judith asked us to Medford for dinner, my wife and I found large photographs of the poet, ruggedly handsome in a dignified suit and tie, propped everywhere on chair-seat, couch, and table-top. These were publicity pictures, and we were to help choose the best one. We learned with astonishment that John had an agent, as nobody else did, that he was going on the road, and that he meant to talk not merely in college auditoriums but in community lecture-halls and the clubrooms of Hokinson-land, vying there with Cornelia Otis Skinner and John Mason Brown. So he proceeded to do. His wish to address a large, general public was reflected also in his famous 1950 anthology, Mid-Century American Poets, which presented fifteen writers roughly of his own generation, among them Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell. John's introduction to the anthology differed from the usual thing in that it was not aimed at highbrows; it was recruiting-literature, aimed at intelligent lay persons who needed to be taught how to read poems, how to despise uplift and sentimentality, how to constitute an audience for a new American poetry which, John felt, had at last outgrown the English influence and could treat of realities in a charged version of our native speech. John's apostolic urge, his urge to "bring the audience to the poem," took him beyond the academy onto the road, into radio and television, into poetry publishing, and into many years of reviewing, editing, and column-writing for the Saturday Review. He became, in his own self-mocking words, "the well-known poet, critic, editor, and middle-high / aesthete of the circuit." I think that, without ever lowering his standards for poetry, he enlivened many minds and accomplished something of his mission. The main negative result of his leaving the academy for wider arenas was, I suspect, the relative neglect of his poetry by academic critics.

Rereading John Ciardi's work, especially if one approaches him through the Selected Poems published two years ago, one is struck by its profoundly autobiographical nature. I don't mean that he was a "confessional" poet; he was too full of modesty and humor to be the histrionic central figure in his own work. But he knew always that his view of things was inseparable from the special conditions of his life. In Part I of the Selected, the poems all have to do with his childhood and youth as the son of southern-Italian immigrants in Boston's North End and later in Medford. His memories of that uprooted Italian world are full of love and gusto, but also of exasperation and hurt. When John was only three, his father's death left him feeling disinherited; and a larger disinheritance was his inability, as a bright first-generation American child, to find sustenance in his tribal ethos—in Mediterranean peasant traditions or a Catholicism which seemed to him superstitious and oppressive. He said in his Lives of X that he had been born in the Middle Ages, adding, "Sometimes I think I've made it out of the dark / but not into the light."

Some things he did inherit: a feeling for the earth, for natural things, for physical work, for the rituals of eating and drinking, for family affection and solidarity. In Part II of the Selected, all the poems have to do with his happy marriage, his household, and his children. Of those things, and of friendship, he was sure, if so thoroughly skeptical a man may be said to have been sure of anything. John's raging skepticism had two aspects. One was an anger at God for being no better than a possibility; he felt cheated of the repose of certainty, and of the tradition and ceremony which can sweeten life. In one poem he says of himself and his young family,

I wish we were Jews and could say
The names of what made us.
I could weep by slow waters for my son
Who has no history, no name
he knows long, no ritual from which he came,
and no fathers but the forgotten.*

The other side of John's skepticism was a rigorous mistrust of all pretensions to know what we don't know; all cocksure theories of divinity or nature; all ideologies which invest history or the state with high purpose; all falsely sanguine views of the human lot or of human behavior. One of his poems ends by saying, "Not everything that happens / Is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is." And the man who had flown so many bombing missions over Japan could write, "High reasons and low causes make a war." I could offer fifty other quotations illustrating John's sense of the limits of knowledge and the limitations of mankind. Only once did I ever hear him overestimate human beings. That was back in the days when instant shaving lather was first being marketed in cans. "People won't buy the stuff," he told me. "My godfather John Follo was a barber, and I know that the only decent lather is worked up on the face." He was right about lather, but for a moment he had forgotten about men's laziness and subjection to advertising. As a rule, in poetry or out, John saw eye to eye with La Rochefoucauld, who traced our best and worst motives to self-interest. The notion, for instance, of altruism—of a wholly selfless benevolence—set John's teeth on edge; he believed in goodness, but not that unearthly kind.

The insistence of John Ciardi's skepticism has led some readers to find him too negative. The poems are indeed insistent; John could not write his best love poem without mentioning again, in passing, the unlikelihood of heaven and the certainty of death. But the poems are in fact very positive: they are the utterance of a man who wishes to embrace the world with his eyes open, on what seem to him honest terms. Even when he writes of those he loves, John does not fail to mention their follies and defects; but the important thing is that he, as another faulty creature, loves them anyway. And so it is when he speaks of the catalpa in his yard: most of the year, he says, it is a nuisance, its branches breaking in the wind, its pods strewing the lawn; but in late June its white flowers are a miracle, and the miracle is what matters. John was an observant and celebratory poet of natural things; if he, like Robert Frost, could find no spiritual revelations in nature, that did not deprive him of wonder, and he wrote excellently of wild turkeys landing or egrets in flight. Art was another thing he celebrated, the art of others and his own practice of art, of which he wrote that "clean white paper waiting under a pen / Is the gift beyond history and hurt and heaven."

John's early work was done in resourceful rhyme and in strict meters expressively handled: I think of the toughly witty poem "Elegy Just in Case," with its subverted echoes of Shakespeare, or the poignant and elevated "Sea Burial." At any time, as in the later poem "Minus One," it was in his power to be formally dazzling. But the characteristic Ciardi poem is not a full-dress performance: it is technically muted and relaxed; colloquial; ruminative; it has the movement of developing thought; it pauses to toy with its own words; it gets carried away by memory or example; it ends with an offhand air. Often such poems begin with a trivial occasion and proceed, in the key of comedy, toward what proves after all to be a serious theme. One poem, for instance, begins with the poet lying sweaty and spread-eagled in a bedroom whose air conditioner has failed; his posture reminds him that he lacks the ideal human proportions described by Vitruvius and drawn by Leonardo; and that starts him off on a train of thought which includes Praxiteles, the Platonic ideas, and the notion of man as God's image. Sometimes the mood of such a poem is darker, even to the point of sadness. Like Wallace Stevens, John lived day by day in a dubious universe, but he did not make Stevens's prudent exclusions. His poems, unlike Stevens's, are full of human attachments, and of humane concern, and given his view of life some sadness was inescapable. The late poem "Being Called" is a boldly sad piece about how hard it is for aging men to admit that they are not what once they were; at the end of it we have a glimpse of John himself in his Key West patio:

…I am in Florida, a February rose nodding

over my toast and coffee in a soft
expensive breeze I can afford,
in a sun I buy daily, gladly,
on a patio under a lime tree.
There is a pleasantness. With luck

it is a kindly long trip down
from cramming winter to this basking
knowledge of nothing. And from Miami
on the make-do transistor, a cracked
wrong quaver that began as Mozart.*

Those lines are rueful, to say the least, in their portrayal of declining powers. What balances the ruefulness, of course, is the good metaphor of the southward journey and that brilliant image of the quavering transistor. The fact is that John wrote well to the end.

Last winter I walked into John's living room and said, "I've just noticed that the words must and stum, which are anagrams of each other, can both mean 'unfermented grape juice.’" Some people, perhaps, would not be stirred by such an announcement. John, however, rose and said, "You don't say! Let's look up the etymologies.'' Out of his lifelong obsession with words, he wrote many of his best magazine columns; in recent years, his PBS radio broadcasts on word origins were relished by a nationwide audience; his Browser's Dictionary, of which a final volume is yet to come, is full of intriguing and opinionated researches into the transformations of language. If John was always one of the prolific poets of his generation, he was also a very diversified industry; I must add to the enterprises already mentioned that he wrote a cracking good textbook called How Does a Poem Mean?, and that his much-honored volumes of children's verse were the sort of verse that children actually like to read. Finally, there is the celebrated undertaking which the Times obituary rightly mentions in its first sentence: his rendering of Dante's Commedia. John's translation simplified the rhyme-structure of the poem, for the sake of greater fidelities, and it is the glory of his version that it matches Dante's whole range of voices, being beautifully harsh where Dante is harsh and, what is most difficult of all, simple where Dante is simple. I think there is no doubt that John Ciardi gave the English language its best Commedia. As I said on another occasion, if it were human to be satisfied, John might have been well satisfied.

He had certain faults, as his own honesty forces me to admit: he could raise his voice, and throw his weight around, and be difficult. But he had many good qualities. He was a courageous man, and a truth-teller. He was also that rare thing, a poet with a finite view of his own merits. He was a warm-hearted man, a lively companion, and a loyal friend. Addio, Giovanni.

*From Selected Poems by John Ciardi. The University of Arkansas Press, copyright © 1984, the Estate of John Ciardi.