The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
_Louis Untermeyer_
Louis Untermeyer was born October 1, 1885, in New York City, where
he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine and New Jersey,
ever since. His education was sketchy; his continued failure to
comprehend algebra and geometry kept him from entering college. His
one ambition was to become a composer. At sixteen he appeared as a
pianist in semi-professional circles; at seventeen he entered his
father’s jewelry manufacturing establishment, of which he became
designer and factory manager.
Untermeyer’s first volume was _The Younger Quire_ (1911), a
twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology (_The Younger Choir_). It
was issued anonymously and only one hundred copies were printed.
Later in the same year, he published a sequence of some seventy
lyrics entitled _First Love_ (1911) in which the influences of
Heine, Henley and Housman were not only obvious but crippling. With
the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume is devoid of
character and, in spite of a certain technical facility, wholly
undistinguished.
It was with _Challenge_ (1914), now in its fourth edition, that the
author first spoke in his own idiom. Although the ghost of Henley
still haunts some of these pages, poems like “Summons,” “Landscapes”
and “Caliban in the Coal Mines” show “a fresh and lyrical sympathy
with the modern world.... His vision” (thus the Boston _Transcript_)
“is a social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of
the forces of justice.”
_Challenge_ was succeeded by _These Times_ (1917), evidently an
“interval” book which, lacking the concentration and unity of the
better known collection, sought (not always successfully) for larger
horizons. Certain poems (like “Swimmers,” “The Laughers” and the
colloquial sonnets) stand out, but as a whole it has neither the
energy of his earlier nor the surety of his later work. _The New
Adam_ (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the varied passions
are fused in a new heat.
Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published two volumes of
critical parodies, “_—— and Other Poets_” (1917) and _Including
Horace_ (1919)—paraphrases of the Latin bard as various classic and
modern poets might have rendered him. He has also printed a strict
metrical translation of three hundred and twenty-five _Poems of
Heinrich Heine_ (1917); a volume of prose criticism, _The New Era in
American Poetry_ (1919); and two text-books. He was one of the
Associate Editors of _The Seven Arts_ (1916-17) and has lectured at
various universities in the Eastern States.