Just as Ciardi has never joined a group, so he has never asked that his poems be approved—they are simply there, written as they demanded to be written from inside their own experience of themselves. They are there—and they will not go away.
John Ciardi published his first poem in
Poetry
magazine in 1939. The forty year since have been fruitful ones. His translation of
The Divine Comedy
is the definitive American rendering. His
How Does a Poem Mean?
, now in a new edition with revisions by Miller Williams, has introduced hundreds of thousands of students to the liveliness of poetry. Above all, John Ciardi is a poet and one of the voices of our literature. This is his fourteenth volume of poems. It demonstrates again that there is a body of poetry specific to his voice, eye, and manner.