If a reader of （some） general culture approached John Ciardi's poems for the first time by way of reviews of recent books, For Instance （1979） and Selected Poems （1984）, he would probably not go on to the poems. It might serve him right, but it would serve many other things wrong. Forty years ago, Ciardi thought such a reader might in the long run be more important to poetry than Eliot and Pound.

As any good reviewer should do, the one in Poetry cut both ways, but the negative slashes are deeper. （The Virginia Quarterly Review was ambivalent on the Selected Poems; see the Spring 1985 issue.） Not only is it “fashionable to consider John Ciardi a poet long past his prime,” but even to defend his recent work is to risk “being labelled hopelessly out-of-touch.” The reason given is that “for years he has published no new volume in which the bad poems do not greatly outnumber the good.” To be sure, “a few times in each book Ciardi has struck exactly the right notes, creating poems that are strong, memorable, and unmistakably personal.” When details are given, they seem personal to the reviewer, as much individual preference as judgment, and not better than another taste. The values are those of the young, progressive, and au courant, and, it follows, pose the possibility that the old fellow may be “on the verge of an important new phase” （Poetry, May 1982, 112-14）. Reviewers said much the same thing of Homeward to America in 1940. It is a nice way to end a review.

However innocently the points are made, the assumptions back of them provoke me to comment. As a reconstructed but unregenerate Southerner, may I speak up for values other than the progressive? I propose in the rest of this essay to give some kind of answer to the question, “Why read Ciardi?” His mastery of his idiom is real and admirable and not in question. Careful rereading will solve most of the problems any of the poems pose. Since I have elsewhere submitted what I found in the other books of poems, let me here keep in mind the recent ones, or at least the aspects that interest me of the late poems of the poet allegedly “long past his prime.” They are the concept of the “unimportant” poem （Ciardi's word） and what the winter view of life offers a reader.

Ciardi said of his own long and fruitful reading of Dante, “I do not read him because he is of the fourteenth century but because I am of the twentieth.” （Dante gives me too many reasons why I should be in Hell.） If I cannot claim quite the same thing for my reading of the modern poet, something like it may pertain.

It is not personal. Ciardi in the flesh I met only once, long enough to shake his hand, a decade before I ever thought to write on him. He talked on the silences of poetry, without notes, reciting whole poems and analyzing them. He spoke quietly, yet held the attention of a large audience. As a new teacher, I was impressed.

The only work of his I knew then was Mid-Century American Poets, which included himself. I did not especially like his poems, though his prose made plenty of sense even in my new-doctoral arrogance. “Elegy Just in Case” was clever, damned clever, but not one of my favorites—I learned later it was one of his and much revised. To me it lacked dignity, substance, the kind of tension I was schooled to value. The tone was brash, hardly polite, not sober or somber, not at all like Tate's “Ode to the Confederate Dead” or the elegant Pyrrhonism of Ransom's poems. I was replete with the ignorance and vulnerability of my arrogance. Didn't I know how to analyze poems? Hadn't I read poetry textbooks and the English and American standard authors? I knew Understanding Poetry and The Well Wrought Urn. I could tear up Joyce Kilmer's “Trees,” which I had been told students liked, and could even add a clever point of my own. The education I got from Ciardi's work began at these low lumens of enlightenment. Before I got through reading his poems, I knew a great deal less than I did on beginning, and by knowing less, I knew a great deal more.

There were many other obstacles. I was Southern; conservative （whatever that meant）; innocent of large segments of life and the world; rural and small town orientation; middle class; Protestant （more inherited than practiced, but certainly not Catholic）. The only Italians I had seen were fruit vendors, first making their rounds in a horse-drawn cart, but later ensconced in a thriving shop in a far-away part of thriving Nashville. They had dark skins and dark oily hair. The children went to Catholic schools. The parents spoke with a funny accent which we knew was Italian.

When I read Ciardi's Missouri poems, I was annoyed. He insufficiently understood his in-laws （who reminded me of my Arkansas relatives）; he was the city boy afield, and the discomfiture of such was a traditional country pleasure. And for a veteran of WWII to worry about boys with.22 rifles as a cause of wars seemed more liberal doctrinaire than real. Forty years later in “Censorship” more of the story comes out, told with grim humor. The squeaky bed springs kept the new husband from his bride; her disapproving parents were a thin wall away. To hell with the rural and its puritanical ways! Any sympathizer with young manhood would agree.

The only actual student of Ciardi's I ever met was a lady whose poems he had read at Bread Loaf. She had suffered a nervous breakdown from his harsh criticisms of her work. As best I could make out, they were to the effect that she should not write Elizabethan poems in the second half of the twentieth century. （Readers may remember the furors he provoked by his negative responses to the poems of two other ladies, Edna Millay and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.） The lady did not know that as bad a shock had happened to youthful Ciardi when John Holmes penciled beside one of his poems, “All right; you're haunted. When does it haunt me?” The mature poet recalled, “I was never pretty again in any mirror.” The lady of my example, sufficiently attractive in person, never again, I will bet, admired her countenance in an “enchanted glass”; whoever looked from her twentieth-century mirror, made in Taiwan, it was not an Elizabethan lady. And whoever wrote her post-Ciardi poems was starkly of our time. A note on another southern education!

Dante did much to educate Ciardi. The medieval poet spoke to him about the craft and art of poetry, about things worth doing; these are endlessly plumable. Surely, too, the older spoke to the younger as a human being, the differences between the two probably more important than any similarities. If I cannot claim all of this, I do claim some of it. And so, whether or not it follows, I read Ciardi because I am Southern, WASP, the descendent of slave owners. （In my childhood, I actually saw a black man, older than the hills, who had been a slave of my great-grandfather.） Nevertheless, there was the family tradition that back a few years we had been fugitives from Prussian military conscription. Reading Ciardi with every difference acknowledged, I am thrown back upon myself. His idea expressed at the time of I Marry You that any man's depths uttered truly speak to any other man's is undoubtedly sound. Even if it were not true, any man's experiences of life however extrapolated and imaginatively twisted for the sake of a poem will appeal to another man's interest in the lives of his fellow men. Southerners have a well-known relish for such tales, as both hearers and tellers—however extrapolated and imaginatively twisted. But I also read Ciardi for what he tells me about the life I inadequately lead. I feel better about my failures, better about the modest successes, the complacencies, aware that this is far from “high aesthetic” experience and based upon self-proclaimed “unimportant” poems.

Ciardi got excellent poetic use out of the idea of the “unimportant” poem, the poem done his way, in “An Apology for Not Invoking the Muse.” His fullest statement is a prose essay in the Michigan Quarterly Review （Winter 1982）, entitled “On the Importance of Unimportant Poems.” As a young man in the red thirties at Michigan, he, like his young compatriots, wrote important poems on the social issues of the day by the requirements of the prevailing dogmas. The mature man, survivor of many conflicts and disillusionments, sees a warped reflection of his earlier days in “young, socially-activated poets” with their evident “assumption that the one prerequisite for poetry is the excitation of one's own ignorance.” Instead of poetry being an assertion or act of will, he now understands it as “a being, a hearkening to being, and a way of being.” He can say with the authority of many books behind him:

I write unimportant poems because I am human and gross and have nothing to say. I am, however, a language suppliant. The language is wiser, deeper, more sentient, and more haunted than anyone who uses it. I mean only to woo the language, to submit myself to it as best I can, and to hope that when I have hearkened to it humbly and gratefully, it will now and then empower me to do what I could never have done when I was important and came to the poem with a half-prepared speech, intending only to raid the language for flourishes.

An artist may, like James and John Crowe Ransom, redo earlier works, ruining them for some readers, or he may refuse revision, like Jeffers and Dylan Thomas, on the ground that he would be kept from new work. Or like Ciardi put out a winnowed selection that includes less than a fifth of the published work, but one that presumably meets his mature standards. Why is it not as good as, or even better than, an “important new phase” for a poet to give us what fruits his maturity will bear? （Auden called it “dry farming.”） Ciardi has done this, if the poems of For Instance, written in his sixth decade, qualify. Should we not want our poets to write all the way to the grave and to leave a volume for posthumous publication? Anything else is absurd. Think of Lawrence's “Bavarian Gentians” and “Ship of Death.”

What is an “unimportant” poem? Presumably, one that is personal, in that it conforms to as much of truth as the interaction between poet and subject will allow and words will vouchsafe. Frost's statement would seem to be related when he said he wanted to lodge a few pebbles where they could not become unlodged. A distant cousin at least is Yeats's pronouncement, “the Romanticist deceives himself, the Rhetorician deceives his neighbors, while Art is but a vision of Reality.”

The forty-two poems in For Instance continue the poet's longtime themes and attitudes, chiefly coming to terms with the contemporary world as its bits and chips scatter about the patio of the self-made rich man who writes when something provokes him to write. I think he must have taken a lot of pleasure writing such poems as “Suburban,” “Knowing Bitches,” and others out of daily, mundane life. If some of the poems seem thin, could suburban life be thin? As Ciardi had said in “Tree Trimming” twenty years earlier, it lacks the dimension of the past. My rural students can recall anecdotes of their forebears in the Revolutionary War, rarely heroic and probably not literally true, but a long family tradition is part of their identity. Ciardi's tones, still recognizable as his own, appear in For Instance, and ironies are as pervasive and necessary to his poems as breath to life. The Italian peasant heritage is now only a brush stroke in the picture of suburban affluence—like a Verga novel, with the final chapters still to be written. Education is spoofed or mocked one more time for the inexactness of its jargon. Best of all is the acceptance, making the best of a good but not flawless existence. What better could a flawed human creature do? His work is made out of everyday experiences that his responses lift to the level of poetry because of his intelligence which sees meaning, parallels, analogues, and relations with the world—the circles widening. Ciardi has a metaphysical mind, in every sense of the term, as Donne's was, only in a different world.

I will not try to illustrate the depths in any Ciardi poem—which I might not be able to do—but we know his commitment to the accurate use of words all the way back to their origins; see his brief disquisition on the right use of “arrive” in How Does a Poem Mean? or see Eliot's use in “Prufrock” of the word “overwhelm,” as called to our attention in the Second Browser's Dictionary, Much of the effect of the poem “Stations” depends upon the play from one meaning of the word to another, often more than one at the same time. This kind of thing offers both poet and reader a sufficiency of aesthetic pleasure. And of course the awareness of the depths of words corresponds to living life with an awareness of its deep places. Thus, more than the aesthetic results, again for poet and reader, so that poetry, whether solemn or not, becomes a moral experience.

Surely, a significant poem is one that echoes through our experiences and explains the meaning of our lives, our actions, and gives us hope, consolation, at the very least something to measure by, so that understanding results. Here a reader may take his choice of poems. The possibilities are several. If enough readers over a period of time make the same choices, perhaps the poems are major.

But why do minor poems and lines stick in my mind? An avid bird-watching friend of mine reads Ciardi because of one of his gull poems. Who knows what else may stick, even if it starts in sentimentality? Could some of the small poems I like be true poems, or do I like them because of my manifold inadequacies? Pebbles are as real as boulders. Perhaps I do have a disinclination for the imposing, the major so tagged in our PR-inundated age. When I was in graduate work at a southern university, I announced the same dissertation topic at the same time as a young Yaleman. My graduate dean, himself a Yaleman, accepted without hesitation the primacy of the other boy's claim and the priority of his announcement. His director, a grand scholar of the old school, had earlier been my dean's director. My rival was said to be “the brightest young man of his generation.” It had to follow that his work would be definitive. Encouraged by my director's sage remark that he had never known a Yaleman who was not “the brightest goddamn young man of his generation,” I entered the race. Perhaps because of not bearing the burden of his superlatives, I beat him through by some months, with a dissertation I long ago realized the faults of. It was acceptable. Fifteen or so years later, his book came out, adapted from the dissertation. It was a nice book. I had it reviewed in a journal I edited. Thus—I like the modest disclaimer that Ciardi makes about the “unimportant” poems he writes. He may not be a modest man, but he is an honest poet.

Basil Bunting characterized Pound's Cantos as the Alps. I will continue my cautious climb, acknowledging the grandeur and possible profundity, but I respond increasingly—a man grows older—to Ciardi's “Washing Your Feet.” It is as moving in its quiet presentation of what a life comes to as is Pound in Pisa admitting the connection between his ego and his plight. If it is wrong to find help in poetry for one's daily realities—if only the help of better understanding by means of recognition and on to perspective—then I admit my crime, my guilt, my lack of sophistication, my need. But since I am not an inexperienced reader, still a long way from dotage, still the enemy of too-easy sentiments, and since I continue to expect poets to work for the responses they get from me, I suggest such poems are true ones, small or not.

Ciardi's “unimportant” poems—I like “In the Hole”—do not aspire to shake the world or swerve things in their course. Leave those ambitions for youths writing important poems. To those of us who are shocked at the years we have accumulated, watching our diets, sunk not altogether happily into our relative complacencies, many of them speak poignantly. We might have been different, we set out to be, we might be yet!—no, not that. We do understand better that life is always as it is, not as it might have been. And, as Ciardi said:

It's good enough. At least not bad.
Better than dog bones and lamb stew.
It does. Or it will have to do.

I must not pretend that I do not value Pound's Pisan admission that an adult thirty years of thought was in ruins forever. It is almost like Lear on the Heath. But I also respond to the old Hardy, the telephone lines humming with no message for him （“Nobody Comes”） or taking in a stray cat in winter （“Snow in the Suburbs”）. Hardy wanted it said that he noticed little things （“Afterwards”）, in which case why is the fallow deer looking warily into the lighted window at night so unforgettable? Ciardi could have gotten a poem out of any of the above. The tone and manner would of course be his own. The same with William Carlos Williams' “Turkey in the Straw,” “The Artist,” “The Sparrow,” “To a Dog Injured in the Street.” Is part of their quality that they are old men's poems? Whatever, I would not want to have missed Ciardi's “Firsts,” “Tuesday: Four Hundred Miles,” “Birthday,” “No White Bird Sings,” “Jackstraws,” “On Passion as a Literary Tradition” from For Instance, these barely noticed or not at all by reviewers. The truth is, as Kenneth Rexroth pointed out, major poets are always writing about everything—he cited Pound's “Les Millwin.” In all the cases, including John Ciardi's, I am grateful.