Louis
Untermeyer was
born in New York on 1st October, 1885.
After a brief formal education he left high school without graduating
and found work with his father's jewelry manufacturing company.
Untermeyer was very interested in literature and in 1911 he published
his first book of poetry, First
Love.
He also held left-wing political views and helped run the Marxist
journal, The Masses. Like most
people involved with the journal, Untermeyer believed that the First
World War had been caused by the imperialist competitive system.
Untermeyer and journalists such as John Reed
who reported the conflict for The
Masses, argued that the USA should remain neutral.
After the USA entered the First World War the
team working on The Masses came
under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused to
do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges. In July, 1917, it
was claimed by the authorities that articles in the journal by Floyd
Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by
Art Young, Boardman
Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp
had violated the Espionage Act. Under
this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the
war effort. The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication. Untermeyer and his friends went
on the publish a very similar journal, The
Liberator.
By 1923
Untermeyer was vice-president in his father's company but he decided
to resign and concentrate on writing. Over the next fifty years he
wrote, edited or translated over one hundred books. This included
several volumes of his own poetry. Untermeyer also lectured on poetry,
drama and music. In 1939 he was appointed Poet in Residence at the
University of Michigan. He also held the same post at the University
of Kansas City and Iowa State College.
Untermeyer was an entertaining talker and in 1950 became a panelist
on the television programme, What's My Line.
He continued to be active in campaigning for left-wing causes and
as a result the FBI had been collecting a
file of his activities. His name was also mentioned during the House
of Un-American Activities Committee
investigation into communist subversion. This was brought to the attention
of the television industry and in 1951
Untermeyer was sacked from What's
My Line and was blacklisted.
Like many left-wing artists during this period, Untermeyer became
a victim of McCarthyism. According
to Arthur
Miller, Untermeyer was so shocked by
this that he did not leave him home for over a year.
In 1956 Untermeyer was awarded
a Gold Medal by the Poetry Society of America. He also served as a
consultant in English poetry for the Library of Congress from 1961
until 1963. Louis
Untermeyer
died on 18th December, 1977.
(1) Louis Untermeyer's poem,
Sunday, about the police action during the Lawrence
Textile Strike, appeared in The Masses
in April 1913.
Down the rapt and singing streets
of little Lawrence
Came
the stolid columns; and, behind the blue-coats,
Grinning
and invisible, bearing unseen torches,
Rode
red hordes of anger, sweeping all before them.
Lust
and Evil joined them - Terror rode among them,
Fury
fired its pistols, Madness stabbed and yelled
Down
the wild and bleeding streets of shuddering Lawrence
Raged
the heedless panic, hour-long and bitter;
Passion
tore and trampled men more mild and peaceful,
Fought
with savage hatred in the name of Law and Order.
And,
below the outcry, like the sea beneath the breakers,
Mingling
with the anguish rolled the solemn organ.
Eleven
in the morning - people were in the church -
Prayers
were in the making - God was near at hand -
It
was Sunday!
(2) Arthur
Miller, Timebends - A Life (1987)
The resurgent American right
of the early fifties, the assault led by Senator McCarthy on the etiquette
of liberal society, was among other things, a hunt for the alienated,
and with remarkable speed conformity became the new style of the hour.
Louis Untermeyer, then in his sixties, was a poet and anthologist,
a distinguished-looking old New York type with a large aristocratic
nose and a passion for conversation, especially about writers and
to become a poet. He married four times, had taught and written and
published, and with the swift rise of television had become nationally
known as one of the original regulars on What's My Line?, a
popular early show in which he, along with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen,
publisher Bennett Cerf, and Arlene Francis, would try to guess the
occupation of a studio guest by asking the fewest possible questions
in the brief time allowed. All this with wisecracking and banter,
at which Louis was a lovable master, what with his instant recall
of every joke and pun he had ever heard.
One day he arrived as usual at the television studio an hour before
the program began and was told by the producer that he was no longer
on the show. It appeared that as a result of having been listed in
Life magazine as a sponsor of the Waldorf Conference (a meeting
to discuss cultural and scientific links with the Soviet Union), an
organized letter campaign protesting his appearance on What's My
Line? had scared the advertisers into getting rid of him.
Louis went back to his apartment. Normally we ran into each other
in the street once or twice a week or kept in touch every month or
so, but I no longer saw him in the neighborhood or heard from him.
Louis didn't leave his apartment for almost a year and a half. An
overwhelming and paralyzing fear had risen him. More than a political
fear, it was really that he had witnessed the tenuousness of human
connection and it had left him in terror. He had always loved a lot
and been loved, especially on the TV program where his quips were
vastly appreciated, and suddenly, he had been thrown into the street,
abolished.
