ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION
Title John Ciardi: The Edward M. Cifelli Collection
Collection Number SC 372
OCLC Number In-process
Creator Various
Provenance Donated in 2003 by Dr. Edward M. Cifelli, John Ciardi's biographer.
Extent, Scope, and Content Note The John Ciardi: The Edward Cifelli Collection is comprised of 18 cubic ft. of books,
manuscripts, artifacts, records, audio recordings, framed items, and research materials
assembled and acquired by Dr. Edward Cifelli. Cifelli is the author of John Ciardi:
A Biography and editor of The Collected Poems of John Ciardi. Both books were published
in 1997. He is a retired professor of English from County College of Morris in Randolph,
NJ and can be reached at jerseybookman@yahoo.com. A dedication celebration for the
collection was hosted by the Special Collections Department and the Center for Italian
Studies on November 19, 2003.
Arrangement and Processing Note Collection processed by Kristen J. Nyitray in March 2005 with the assistance of F.
Berenice Baez-Revueltas, graduate student assistant. Updated March 2014 and May 2019
by Kristen J. Nyitray.
Series arrangement by original and alphabetical order.
SUBGROUP I: Books Series 1: Books of Adult Poetry Series 2: Anthologies with John Ciardi Poems Series 3: Books of Childrens Poetry Series 4: Childrens Anthologies with John Ciardi Poems Series 5: Books of Limericks Series 6: Translations of Dante's Divine Comedy Sub-series 1: Cantos 1-4, UKC REVIEW Sub-series 2: New World Writing, #15, Purgatorio, canto 2 Sub-series 3: The Rarer Action, Paradiso, Canto 33 Sub-series 4: RUP (1954) Sub-series 5: Mentor Editions Sub-series 6: Norton Edition Sub-series 7: Franklin Editions Sub-series 8: Modern Library Edition Sub-series 9: Three Lectures Sub-series 10: Italian Literature in Translation Series 7: Textbooks Sub-series 1: How Does a Poem Mean? Sub-series 2: Poetry: A Closer Look Sub-series 3: Steps to Reading Literature Series 8: Books with Essays by John Ciardi Series 9: Treat It Gentle (The autobiography of jazz musician Sidney Bechet) Series 10: Browser's Dictionaries Series 11: Autobiography and Biography Series 12: Bibliography Series 13: Books about John Ciardi
SUBGROUP II: Published and Unpublished Material SUBGROUP III: Manuscripts and Letters SUBGROUP IV: Framed Items SUBGROUP V: Recordings SUBGROUP VI: Audio and Visual SUBGROUP VII: The Saturday Review SUBGROUP VIII: John Ciardi Research Material - Dr. Edward Cifelli
Language(s) English
Restrictions on Access The collection is open to researchers without restriction.
Rights and Permissions Stony Brook University Libraries' consent to access as the physical owner of the collection
does not address copyright issues that may affect publication rights. It is the sole
responsibility of the user of Special Collections and University Archives materials
to investigate the copyright status of any given work and to seek and obtain permission
where needed prior to publication.
Citation [Item], [Box],John Ciardi: The Edward M. Cifelli Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, Stony Brook University Libraries.
Historical Note "John Ciardi (1916-1986") by Edward M. Cifelli
"When poet John Ciardi died unexpectedly of a heart attack on Easter Sunday 1986 at
his home in Metuchen, New Jersey, he was internationally mourned. Every major news
outlet in the United States carried an obituary story, for Ciardi had earned his reputation
as an American literary figure. More than that, he had also somehow managed to achieve
the elusive American Dream by becoming that rarest of all rare things, the millionaire
poet. A humbly born son of Italian immigrants in Boston’s Little Italy, Ciardi had
built by 1986 a solid reputation in six different areas as a kind of larger-than-life
cultural legend.
First and foremost, he was well known for his poetry, 21 volumes of it, beginning
in 1940 and ending when the last four books were published after his death by special
arrangement with the executors of his estate. The last of these, his 600-page Collected
Poems, was published in 1997 and is still available from the University of Arkansas
Press. In the end, Ciardi’s niche as one of America’s best mid-century poets the,
"Eisenhower Laureate" as Tom Disch in a review of Collected Poems called him in Poetry,
is well established: he occupies a well-earned position among such notable mid-century
poets as Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell.
Ciardi was master of what he liked to call the Unimportant Poem, the sort of poem
written to celebrate nothing more important than the sipping of coffee at breakfast
or the watching of birds in the backyard. He wrote love poems too, and poems about
his Italian heritage. He was also a veteran of World War II and wrote an excellent
book of poems, Other Skies, about that experience. He wrote one complete book, Lives
of X, about being born in Boston's Italian North End and then growing up in a nearby
German-Irish town. He was being humble when he called his poems "unimportant" because
they were about the most important subject of all not just his own life, but everyone’s.
And one ought to mention for all those to whom such things matter that ethnicity by
itself is not a factor in establishing Ciardi’s literary reputation. For Italian Americans,
of course, there is special fun and pride in his poems about Italian Sunday dinners,
favorite uncles and aunts, and his father’s love of opera, for Ciardi wrote often
and well about such subjects; however, he never thought of himself as being so narrowly
American, so marginalized. He is known today for many, many poems that have nothing
at all to do with his being Italian. And so, while he valued his European heritage
and treasured his Italian roots, Ciardi became an important unhyphenated American
poet. He believed unquestionably that in a meritocracy, the only thing that matters
is the quality of one’s work: good poems would be remembered.
A second reason readers connect with Ciardi is his sixteen books of award-winning
children’s poetry, books with such fun-sounding titles as The Man Who Sang the Sillies,
The Reason for the Pelican, and Doodle Soup. There are monster poems, bedtime poems,
and plenty of naughty boys and girls poems. And Ciardi was not merely a successful
writer of children’s poems, he was also very popular in their classrooms as well,
where he met with them as often as they asked him to. These poetic accomplishments
would be enough for most reputations to rest on, but with John Ciardi, they pale in
comparison to his importance as the translator of the greatest Italian poet of all
time, Dante Alighieri. Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s masterwork, The Inferno, was
published in 1954 and is still in print today in the Modern Library Edition. And despite
many new translations, Ciardi’s remains both popular and so widely respected that
college students routinely have his translation assigned in the standard Norton anthology
of world literature. The second and third volumes of Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s
great book, The Purgatorio and The Paradiso, were published in 1961 and 1970, and
maintained the same high standards and reader satisfaction. As Dudley Fitts wrote
of Ciardi’s translation in 1954, this is "the best we have seen: Here is our Dante,
Dante for the first time translated into virile, tense American verse. . . a shining
event in a bad age"
Yet another reason accounting for Ciardi’s popularity and national reputation is actually
a combination of reasons, like his CBS network program called Accent in 1961-62; his
National Public Radio program called A Word in Your Ear from 1977-86; his twice-a-month
magazine column called "Manner of Speaking" in the nationally known Saturday Review
from 1961-72; and his directorship from 1955-72 of what was then the country’s most
widely respected writers' conference, Bread Loaf, in Middlebury, Vermont. Ciardi was
so important to the literary landscape in mid-century America that he made two appearances
on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
The fifth reason accounting for John Ciardi’s position in twentieth-century American
letters is his set of Browser’s Dictionaries. Ciardi had always been intrigued by
every aspect of language, so when he became curious about where words and expressions
came from, he entered the field with the same passion that he had shown for poetry
then children's literature then Dante. The miracle is that on even such esoteric topics
as etymologies, Ciardi managed to be a popular writer. He interested a commercial
publisher, Harper & Row, in publishing the first book, which sold so many copies that
three volumes were eventually published. Ciardi never sacrificed what might be called
academic respectability in these books, but as usual with him, one is more impressed
with his readability and common touch than with the also evident high level of scholarship.
If one needs even more reason to explain Ciardi’s reputation over his lifetime, there
is always his lecture-circuit popularity. He actually left a tenured full-professorship
at Rutgers University in order to support his family by lecturing all over the country
at such high rates that even he could sometimes be embarrassed by them. He was fond
of saying that people would rarely buy books of poetry, but that they would regularly
pay him large sums of money to talk about them.
And thus it was that this once poverty-stricken son of Italian immigrants managed
to turn a career in poetry into a million-dollar industry. Only in America!"
Subjects Ciardi, John -- 1916-1986 Poets, American -- 20th century. Poets, American.
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