Page "John Ciardi" Paragraph 17

Critic and poet Kenneth Rexroth described Ciardi as ".

singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives and feuds.

He is more like a very literate, gently appetitive, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond of deep simple things like his wife and kids, his friends and students, Dante's verse and good food and wine.

" " During his years at Bread Loaf and at the Saturday Review, Ciardi established a reputation as a tough, sometimes harsh, critic.

" " His review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1956 book The Unicorn touched off what the Review's editor, Norman Cousins, described as the biggest storm of reader protest in the magazine's history.

" " Ciardi defended his stand, noting that it was the reviewer's duty to damn when warranted.

" In similar circumstances, Ciardi " described Robert Frost's ‘ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ’ as expressing the death wish of its speaker ".

May Sarton, for example, accused Ciardi of " hather guts and doing everything he could to destroy " in describing the difficulties faced by women poets.