Word: gioia
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During his time at Harvard, Gioia studied a great deal of poetry, including Virgil’s Aeneid, which has become his favorite long poem. Before coming to Harvard, he had read the poem twice in the original Latin, but it was rereading the poem in Fitzgerald’s course on narrative poetry that “opened up its astonishing verbal beauty and human resonance” to Gioia, who attributes his love for the poem to his Italian and Mexican background...
This cultural background, Gioia says, informs his sense of personal identity—a sense that his time at Harvard helped to cement...
...self-described “working-class scholarship kid from California,” Gioia found the Harvard of the 1970s to be a place very much “steeped in wealth, privilege, and tradition.” His immersion in this foreign environment gave him a stronger “sense of self as a working class, Latin, Catholic intellectual...
...When Gioia finished school and began a business career in New York, he was faced with finding time to write outside of his eleven-hour work...
...Gioia also credits his business experience with fortifying his conviction that poetry should not be solely the province of academics and intellectuals...