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University Daily Kansar Thursday, Oct. 8, 1950
Limited Activities
Last week, the president of the student body at Iowa State University called for a reduction in the number of extracurricular activities on that campus.
The speaker admitted the activities were good in themselves but said they required too much student time and exerted pressure on the student body.
The president may base his reasoning on sound logic. Perhaps there are too many minor activities at Iowa State. This is for the students of that institution to decide.
However, we feel the question is a pertinent one, applicable to all colleges and universities. Undeniably, there is a trend toward specialized learning and away from the liberal education which moulded our fathers.
De-emphasis is one of the most popular words on college campuses today. College students concentrate on facts. Their knowledge is narrowed by specialization. Those activities, once considered essential, which help round students into broad, personable adults, are slipping from the scene.
Likewise, those courses which were the foundation of the liberal arts education no longer
receive the attention they once did. Education is geared to the specialist who is only interested in devouring essential facts.
The result, at best, is unsatisfactory. Few educated men walk from the graduation stage these days—men whose knowledge entitled them to the respect and company of all classes of society.
Today, we produce men, narrow in scope, who function apart from the world. They are experts in their individual fields, but lack training in human understanding needed to establish rapport with other members of society.
They write narrowly of limited subjects. They speak only the jargon of their specialty. They think in terms of fields rather than worlds.
We do not argue against the limiting of certain activities at a particular school. However, we do reject the thinking behind the general movement to restrict students to academic pursuits.
Activities, certainly, have their place in an intellectual atmosphere. They perform a valued service in helping produce the well-rounded graduate who understands himself and his community as well as his profession.
—George DeBord
An Editorial Feature
Ciardi, Poet and Critic
Bv John Husar
"The joy-trees rust in tumbles of the snow
Like fishbones at the backdoors of the feast...”
The above lines came from the mind of poet-critic John Ciardi, poetry editor of the Saturday Review. Mr. Ciardi, also professor of English at Rutgers University, will arrive here tomorrow to deliver a lecture titled, "How a Poem Means," in Bailey Auditorium.
Mr. Ciardi, a graduate of Tufts College, has written numerous poems, essays and criticisms of poetry. In his present job, he has written on poetry and its place in contemporary literature. His poems are welcome contributions to many literary magazines.
"The poetry of the surviving Genteel leans heavily to the big abstractions loudly proclaimed, to blue-birds, to 'yet I know's' and 'do but command's,' and to the wonder the wonder the wonder of being fifty in a vague suburban way," he wrote.
He is an avowed campaigner against what he calls the "surviving Genteel Tradition" in modern poetry, declaring that such poetry will never appear in the Saturday Review while he is that department's editor.
Opposite Attitude
"For present purposes, let me summarize the opposite attitude with a line and a half from Browning: 'Thoughts may be/ Overpoetical for poetry.' Poets and readers of this persuasion...tend to find the output of the Genteel Tradition to be musky and mindless...(either) pretty, vague, and easily effusive...(or) real, physical, and disciplined," he continued.
Using this reasoning, Mr. Ciardi stepped into the center of one of the more famous literary controversies of the century when he ridiculed a best-selling book by the popular poet Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Mr. Clardi, writing in the Jan. 12, 1957 issue of the Saturday Review called Mrs. Lindbergh's well-publicized book, "The Unicorn and Other Poems," an "offensively bad book—nept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of esthetic and human failure that will accept any shriek as a true high-C."
Mrs. Lindbergh, a favorite especially among women readers, was duly supported by her fans, who supplied the Saturday Review desk with hundreds of complaining letters. Even the magazine's editor, Norman Cousins, editorially acclaimed Mrs. Lindbergh's poetry and criticized Mr. Clardi for "giving literalness far more sovereignty than it needs or enjoys in verse."
But Mr. Ciardi was not deflated by any means. He rested his feelings on the matter in an equally strong supplementary article, defending his judgment by stating:
"I am trying to establish as a policy of this magazine that poetry is a serious, dignified, and disciplined human activity which is not to be debased in the name of a counterfeit sentimentality that will not bother to learn the fundamentals of its own art."
Hit the Top
That Mr. Ciardi was treading on controversial ground is certain. Mrs. Lindbergh's volume was rated by a national poll as one of the
best books of verse for that year.
Confirming his stand, he wrote:
John Ciardi
Tender Side
"I damned 'The Unicorn,' first for the reasons stated in the review itself—because the poetry struck me as miserable stuff and because I am not willing to concede that personal distinction can compensate for slovenly performance... I did so, more importantly however, because her book was bound to have a wide circulation and to receive many vague accolades...
"I must insist, however, that the real misfortune was in writing these poems. I was especially ready to sail into them, first because they provided an excellent opportunity to define further that sort of pernicious poetry I mean to have none of in SR (The Saturday Review), and, second, because they provided an excellent opportunity to offer an essential challenge to the whole pussy-footing process of book reviewing in our national mass-media."
It is easy, thus, to assume that Mr. Ciardi is a powerful writer who expresses his beliefs, no matter how small a minority they may represent. But his poetry expresses another side of the man, much more tender, yet equally as deep and definite as his analyses.
One of his more famous poems,
"Men Marry What They Need.
I Marry You." reprinted on this page,
is taken from Mr. Ciardi's 1958 volume of poems, "I Marry You—A Sheaf of Love Poems."
His poems, always reflecting rich sentiment and emotion, are drawn from many experiences. A World War II fiver, Mr. Ciardi measured his feelings of Aug. 26, 1945, and drew from them the basis of his great work, "V-J Day." On another occasion, while in a hospital, his sympathy for a sick child was recreated in the lines of "Breakfast in Bed in a Hospital." Both poems will be reproduced on this page tomorrow.
Each of Mr. Ciardi's many magazine articles and textbook chapters on poetry has illuminated the meaning of that art. A complex product of intense research and resulting creativity, Mr. Ciardi has never hesitated to enroll in controversy. His lecture tomorrow evening should be a fruitful experience.
In the Dark
After noticing that women's skirts are somewhat shorter this year, we investigated and found that female fashions really are designed by men. Good work, fellas.
With John Morrissey
--inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn
Spirits among the senior men watching last Saturday's game were extremely high, as were the men.
Yep, it happened. Finally. A freshman ROTC cadet actually saluted one of the campus traffic cops.
--inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn
. . .
One prediction about Strong basement. Coffee sales are bound to drop. She's married!
Comes the Beatnik Golden Rule;
Bug Not Thy Neighbor.
***
* *
When crossing streets from now on, first clear yourself both ways and then check the sky. Air Force and Army ROTC cadets have started their flight training program.
***
Ever wonder how we got the four Southwest Conference football players? Still wonder where the athletic department's $4,500 went? Well, now you know the power of inference.
***
Football fans! It's Army vs. Navy
at KU this week. ROTC, that is.
UNIVERSITY
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triveweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 711, business room Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service. 420 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $3 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays, and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Harrison ... Managing Editor
Carol Allen, Dick Crocker, Jack Morton and Doug Yocom, Assistant
Managing Editors; Rael Amos, City Editor; Jim Trotter, Sports Editor;
Carolyn Frailey, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
George DeBord and John Husar ... Co-Editorial Editors
Saundra Hayn, Associate Editorial Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
BILL Kane Business Manager
Ted Tidwell, Advertising Manager; Joanne Novak, Promotion Manager;
Ruth Rieder, National Advertising Manager; Tom Schmitz,
Circulation Manager; John Massa, Classified Advertising Manager.
The Poetry of John Ciardi
MEN MARRY WHAT THEY NEED. I MARRY YOU.
Men marry what they need. I marry you morning by morning, day by day, night by night, and every marriage makes this marriage new.
In the broken name of heaven, in the light that shatters granite, by the spitting shore, in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,
I marry you from time and a great door is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone, sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more
and learn to let time spend. Why should I bother the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother
by names they prove, but that thin buzz whines through: when reason falls to reasons, cause is true. Men marry what they need. I marry you.
Worth Repeating
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.-J. Lawrence Pool.
**
Have we not in our times learned to break the mystery of space? We carry, like Aladdin, a wonderful lamp, producing, it is true, more genii than illumination.-Luis Munoz Marin.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler