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
The day will happen whether or not you get up.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.
Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!
A dollar saved is a quarter earned.
Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.
Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.
A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
The public library is the most dangerous place in town
I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.
It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.
The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.
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.
At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.