WASHINGTON, D.C.—After six years at the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts, Chairman Dana Gioia has announced that he will step down in January, well before the end of his second four-year term, reports the Associated Press.

"I have traveled nearly every week for six years and I usually work six to seven days a week,'' said Gioia, 57. ''I feel I've earned the right to return to my private life as an artist.''

Gioia's tenure has been marked by a notable lack of controversy, and by efforts to engage groups not traditionally invested in the arts with such projects as "Operation Homecoming," a collection of stories written by soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He has also, in the last year, raised the NEA's budget 20 percent.

An award-winning poet and former vice president of General Foods, Gioia was named for the position by President Bush in 2002 after Bush's first choice, composer Michael P. Hammond, died unexpectedly. Gioia vowed at the time to get the NEA out of the ''culture wars'' and to ''restore the endowment to its rightful place as one of the premier institutions in the United States.''

Gioia said he planned to step down last year but instead will leave office around when Bush does. He will take a part-time position at the nonprofit research and policy center the Aspen Institute after his departure; he plans to commute between Washington and his native California and hopes to return to his literary life.

''Poets possess a very precarious creative gift; it can go bad or vanish easily,'' he says. ''I like to remember there were some poets like Goethe, Milton, and Yeats who went into public life, then wrote their greatest work after they were leaving. Then you had Matthew Arnold, who went into public life and never wrote poetry again.''