Books: Poets & Untermeyer

FROM ANOTHER WORLD—Louis Untermeyer—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Though poetry may not be a profession, Louis Untermeyer has seemed to prove that there is a profession in it. His anthologies of modern poetry have sold 478,081 copies in the U. S.* getting stouter with every edition. They are standard in newspaper libraries, as obituary material on poets, and indispensable to teachers of literature, as candy at the end of term.

From Another World is Louis Untermeyer's autobiography at 53. Among other things that readers may be surprised to learn is that for 22 years Poetry's great middleman engaged in a prosperous Manhattan jewelry business. A new generation will scarcely recall that he was also on the staff of the old socialist Masses, which the Post Office Department prosecuted twice in 1918 for opposing U. S. entry into World War I.

A lover of Heine, an inveterate parodist and would-be musician, Untermeyer contributed second rate verse and lofty reviews to The Masses, The Seven Arts and The Liberator, only one of the three to survive the War. As superintendent of a jewelry factory in Newark, N. J., Business man Untermeyer invited his 150 astonished employes to unionize, claims he established the first 44-hour week in the industry.

Not long thereafter (in 1923) he retired, set about meeting all the poets. Plutocrat Amy Lowell charmed him by providing her guests with bath towels to spread across their knees in defense against her 17 slavering sheepdogs. In Rapallo he found a note at his hotel from Ezra Pound: "The fact that your taste in poetry is exectable shouldn't prevent us from having a vermouth together."

But the poets who became his friends were Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Robert Frost, William Rose Benét and his wife, Elinor Wylie. Advised Lindsay: "Base the serious side of your criticism of poetry with the tone of Abraham Lincoln as a touchstone, and the criticism of humor on the tone of Mark Twain. . . . We must have a humorous standard. Young writers. . . have been offered every kind of freedom by the critics but this—the freedom to laugh. . . ."