Ciardi, War Poet, To Speak on His Works Tomorrow

Morris Gray '77, who gave Harvard $40,000 in 1929, "the income to be applied to the purchase of books and the giving of occasional talks on current modern poetry," would have approved of the most recent choice of speaker. Gray was as much concerned with the yet-to-be's as with the already-are's, and tomorrow's Morris Gray lecturer slated to speak at 4:30 o'clock in Sever 11, John Ciardi (pronounced Chardi), must be classified in the former category.

Ciardi, who flew with the B-29's out of Saipan, is now trying to climb into the stratosphere of contemporary American poetry. Although few people except New Yorker and Atlantic readers have ever heard of him, he finds himself sharing the 1946-47 lecture platform with Robert Frost (November), Wallace Stevens (February), and T. S. Eliot, who will speak sometime in May.

Second Book on Way

Currently instructing in English A, he will publish his second book, Other Skies, primarily war poems, next Fall. Ciardi is the latest in a long list of Morris Gray lecturers which includes practically every ranking American poet, and many of the lesser ones.

Theodore Spencer, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and chairman of the English department committee which administers the Fund, calls him "one of the younger poets ... honest and straightforward . . . whose war poetry gives a good physchological account, and physical description."

Apprentice or master, the selection would have made little difference to the founder of the Fund, whose wish was to make poetry live for as many people as possible. As President of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Gray expounded his theory that the "real love of art that brings happiness and inspiration to the heart of man is rare and does not manifest itself in clover criticism." Contrastingly, knowledge of art was in his opinion merely a "common, intellectual interest."

Following Gray's death in 1931 at the age of 75, a classmate described him as "sympathetic and affectionate, with a delicate appreciation for the beautiful . . . he loved poetry, wrote it himself, and longed to give the same pleasure to others that it had for him."

The Morris Gray Lectures have fulfilled his wishes