Louis Untermeyer: Robert Frost’s restless friend

I

The restless, sparkling, warm-hearted, German-Jewish Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), fond of stylish bow ties and outrageous puns, had a high forehead, beaked nose, thick glasses, thin lips and witty tongue.  He was a successful businessman, talented pianist, prolific and influential anthologist, editor, critic and reviewer, translator of Heinrich Heine, popular lecturer and poet-in-residence at several universities.  At various times he was also the Librarian of Congress, American cultural representative in India and Japan, and celebrated panelist on the popular television programme “What’s My Line?”  A cultural purveyor in his day, firmly middlebrow in taste and mediocre in poetry, he is remembered now for his enduring friendship with Robert Frost and keen appreciation of his poetry.

Arthur Miller, his friend in Brooklyn and Connecticut, called him a loving master of wisecracking banter, with an “instant recall of every joke and pun he had ever heard.”  Conrad Aiken’s biographer writes that the poet “enjoyed conversing and arguing with Untermeyer, the articulate, well-groomed, mostly self-educated poet and critic, whose prodigious energy permitted him to run a family jewelry business by day and write and socialise at night.  He was a curious mixture of hard-nosed entrepreneurial skills, instinctive insights into the modernist achievements and personal naiveté.  Aiken had no respect for his poetry but found him stimulating and congenial.”  Untermeyer told Aiken about his changeable moods, “I am an incurable extrovert—and, what makes matters worse, I hug my disease.  It has taken twelve bristling years to adjust my offensively yea-saying impulses to the dark introspectiveness of my wife.”

In 1920, when he was 35, the energetic Untermeyer was still combining the literary life in Manhattan with operating his jewellery factory in Newark, New Jersey.  He had 150 employees and, true to his socialist principles, reduced their weekly work hours and encouraged them to unionise.  He was wealthy, both from his business and his published works, and generously gave  gifts of jewellery and money.  His prodigious output and contacts with authors, publishers, editors and university professors enabled him to help many struggling writers.

Untermeyer admitted that his first anthology, Modern American Poetry (1919), had commercial rather than aesthetic standards, and was “a miscellaneous mixture of a little good poetry and a great deal of mediocre verse, an olla podrida [Spanish stew] of which I was ashamed as soon as it was in print.”  But his endless series of popular anthologies were widely used by many college students (including myself).  Inclusion in these influential anthologies made a poet’s reputation, while rejection or silent beheading from later editions damaged it.  “Undertaker’s dictatorship” shaped poetic taste for several generations.  Time magazine reported that by October 1939 his anthologies of modern American and British poetry had sold a staggering 480,000 copies.

Poets not included among the happy few and chosen people heaped frequent and furious abuse on him.  Max Eastman got angry when Untermeyer dropped him, possibly for political reasons, from the fifth edition of Modern American Poets (1936).  John Gould Fletcher put the knife in by exclaiming, “I should have remembered what everyone says, that you have no standards and wouldn’t know a good poem from a bad one.”  But Untermeyer could also be mollified.  In 1928, E. E. Cummings said that “Untermeyer would be remembered as the man who excluded William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore from his anthology.”  In the next edition, heeding the sharp reminder, he blessed both poets — as well as Cummings.  Yet Cummings could not resist satirising Untermeyer for including his own otiose works: “mr u will not be missed / who as an anthologist / sold the many on the few / not excluding mr u.”

Untermeyer was fascinated by both the extraordinary appearance and Amygism of the formidable, dynastic and tasteless poetaster Amy Lowell, sister of the president of Harvard.  Her biographer notes that “some glandular defect had made the heavy body seem more swollen and the short frame more stunted than it really was. ‘Lord,’ she would say, ‘I’m a walking
sideshow,’ ” as if she were featured in a circus.

Untermeyer described “Amy Lowell with her two hundred pounds, her inevitable cigar and her peremptory manner,” and said her “energy and income matched her enormous girth.”  He thought she lacked genuine and lasting talent, and tried “to substitute motion and commotion for outright inspiration”, though the same was true of Untermeyer himself.  Again like Untermeyer, as her biographer observed, “Lowell had a genius for everything except the thing she wanted most: permanence as a poet.”  To compensate for his poetic defects, she advised Untermeyer to be his “own impresario.  There’s no point in having a trumpet—or any brass—if you don’t blow it.”  He dutifully followed her Joshua-like advice and blasted his way into the literary fortress.

Untermeyer hurt his reputation by condemning the pedantic faults and failing to see the merits of the most avant-garde poets, who challenged critics to explain their erudite obscurities.  In 1919 he apologised to Conrad Aiken for slighting Eliot (his classmate at Harvard) and asked him to “bear in mind that this hesitant collection is part propaganda, an effort to combat the entrenched prejudices of the average reader of Littachoor.”  He added, “I am reacting to The Waste Land in pretty much the way you would expect.  I think it is principally a clever mosaic, with a few elevated and many altogether cheap spots; a pastiche of garbled cultures and malformed quotations not sufficiently ‘lifted’ by Eliot’s method, which will undoubtedly infuriate you.”

In a similar fashion, he thought Pound’s Cantos “degenerated into overwhelming garrulity, into a jigsaw puzzle of history, scraps of myths, and fragments of literature, of confused significance and violence.”  When Pound was convicted of treason for wartime fascist broadcasts, Untermeyer could not resist a joke and remarked, “I do not believe he should be shot.  I would favor merely life imprisonment in a cell surrounded by books—all of them copies of the works of Edgar A. Guest”— the sentimental, inspirational “People’s Poet” who was Pound’s antithesis.

Untermeyer was surprisingly frank about his own literary faults.  He confessed that he was too facile, too superficial and too prolific, and that his inferior verse catered to the masses and had cancelled out his attempts to write more serious work.  A man of many talents and great energy, he admitted, “I had spent too many days in too many other activities and in too many places.”

In 1951 his involvement with the long-running television programme “What’s My Line?” was disastrous.  The panel of four had to guess the unusual and often strange occupations of the guests, whose appearance to the audience seemed to contradict their line of work.  During Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Life magazine named Untermeyer as a Communist sympathiser, and a malicious campaign protesting his appearance on “What’s My Line?” frightened the sponsors and forced them to fire him.  He said, “I was depressed not because I was no longer a television ‘celebrity,’ but because I had become involved in a national nightmare.”  Arthur Miller recalled that Untermeyer plunged into a deep and lasting depression.  He didn’t answer the phone or “leave his apartment for almost a year and a half.  An overwhelming and paralyzing fear had risen in 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.”

The clever and witty Untermeyer was an emotional mess.  He had four tragi-comic marriages: to the poet Jean Starr, 1907-26; to the poet Virginia Moore, 1926-28; to Jean Starr for the second time, 1929-30; to the lawyer Esther Antin, 1933-48; and to the magazine editor Bryna Ivens from 1948 to his death in 1977.  He remarried right after each bitter divorce; put Jean’s and Virginia’s poems in his anthologies when they were together and took them out when they parted.

In his autobiography Bygones (1965), Untermeyer offers an agonising account of his relations with Starr that lacks understanding or an explanation of what went wrong.  Instead of trying to deal with their problems and settle their disputes, he wrote, “there was little time for bickering about differences that were basic and, in the end, irreconcilable.”  He confessed that he was stimulated by their fits and fights: “We were unable to reconcile ourselves to the demands of our temperaments.  We needed each other as antagonists. . . .Our prolonged quarrels inevitably centered about the conflicting needs of two separate spoiled individuals opposed to each other’s desires, quarrels that mounted in violence with wild accusations and agonized self-justifications. . . . The radical differences in our natures were pulling us apart.  She terminated most of our quarrels with threats of suicide.”  He never dared to call her bluff and couldn’t live with his guilt if she had actually killed herself.

Their second time around was a painful repetition of the first: “It was the conflict of light and dark all over again.  Jean seemed to be sinking deeper into a slough of despond, while she appeared to find my attitude either insensitive or frivolous. . . I was tied to a wife who, when I left for an afternoon with new friends, faced me with a storm of jealousy, ending in masochistic threats and renewed intimations of suicide. . . . Looking back, I cannot believe that any man could have been so irresponsible, so unrealistic.  The only excuse I can give is that I was out of my mind.”  Pleading insanity and with an astonishing lack of awareness, he blindly repeated his mistakes, irrational acts and self-destructive behavior.  For the second time, Jean clung miserably to him and again refused to grant a divorce.  But on one occasion she emerged from the bathroom and shocked him with, “You can forget the lawsuit.  You are free now.”  She had taken an overdose of barbiturates, but had her stomach pumped and signed the separation agreement.

The hopeless husband had four sons.  In January 1927, right after his parents’ divorce, their son Richard, aged 19, hanged himself in his dormitory room at Yale.  He had been cheerful, had friends, liked college and made plans for the future.  With his usual unawareness, Untermeyer lamented, “No one could make sense of what had happened.  No one could give me a clue as to what might have made Dick take his own life.  It remains a horrible mystery.”  He didn’t realize that Richard, suffering under the strain of Untermeyer’s miserable marriage to Jean, had inherited his mother’s madness and carried out her frequent threats to commit suicide.

When Untermeyer met the beautiful Virginia Moore, 18 years his junior, Jean was more possessive than ever and repeated her now familiar but still dangerous threats to kill herself.

On their Mexican honeymoon, following his Mexican divorce, Virginia was stricken by severe dysentery.  He ignored her filthy and humiliating experience, and remarked with self-pity and lack of sympathy, “Nothing can take the honey out of a honeymoon more effectively than a bride who spends her time in the bathroom instead of in the bed.  Poor Virginia lay down only to moan until the next frantic bolt to the water closet.”

When the couple settled in London, Untermeyer was still insecure, unstable and emotionally immature.  As he withdrew from Virginia, she sought refuge in Christian Science, whose tedious “healers” and “cures” merely irritated him.  When Virginia became pregnant, she suffered from severe morning sickness and couldn’t eat with anyone else, and he was forced to take his meals alone.  He concluded, “After a two-year struggle with love and conscience I was divorced from Virginia and remarried Jean.”

Jean came from Zanesville, Ohio; his third wife, Esther Antin, was a lawyer from Toledo, Ohio.  To paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s crack about Hemingway: anyone who’s married two girls from Ohio hasn’t learned much.  Untermeyer regretfully recalled: “My enjoyment of Esther’s gaiety alternated with fits of irritation over what was an increasing emotional incompatibility; my appreciation of her managerial skills was offset by my impatience with her dogmatic assurance. . . . Since Esther could not give me what I thought I needed, I compromised on small flirtations and aimless infidelities. . . . In spite of outbreaks of hostility, followed by sullen withdrawals, the strained bonds held for a decade.”

After suffering in his first marriage, he failed to find happiness with his second wife, his remarriage to Jean or his third wife.  After his divorce from Esther he wearily confessed, “I was tired of getting married, tired of turning a sudden passion into a permanent attachment, tired of seeing myself as a lover transformed into a bad husband.”  But instead of retiring from wedlock, he plunged into a fourth marriage with Bryna Ivens.  She was 24 years younger, they co-edited some story collections together and—with the elderly Untermeyer no longer pugnacious– their marriage lasted for 30 years until his death.  Still joking at 85, he told Arthur Miller, “I’m still chasing them.  The only difference is that now I can’t remember why.”

Untermeyer’s connection to Jean Starr is a classic example of why people marry, divorce and remarry the same spouse, and what goes wrong the second time.  Samuel Johnson called a second marriage “The triumph of hope over experience.”  Scott Fitzgerald warned, “There are no second acts in American lives”—or in American marriages.  Many people boldly take the chance to replay and transform their first failure but, like Untermeyer, feel compelled to make the same mistakes.  His divorces didn’t work out.  He did not drink or gamble, but had a mentally ill and suicidal wife, met other women and was unfaithful.

Despite his many talents, engaging personality and widespread poetical influence, Untermeyer, apart from his friendship with Frost, has been forgotten.  He did not recognise the most innovative poets, his anthologies became obsolete and were soon replaced by others more responsive to contemporary work.  He buried himself in nearly 100 books and never wrote a memorable major work.  His own verse, alas, was weary, stale, flat, unprofitable.

II

Robert Frost in 1949

The strange friendship of Untermeyer and Frost was a union of opposites: Jewish and Christian, urban New York and rural New England, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, social and solitary, kind and harsh, imperceptive and shrewd, lascivious and puritanical, much married and monogamous.  They met in Boston in the spring of 1915 and, after the death in the Great War of the English poet Edward Thomas, Untermeyer became Frost’s closest friend for fifty years.

One of the first to recognize Frost’s greatness in his favourable review of North of Boston (1915), Untermeyer worked hard to enhance Frost’s reputation and helped create his public image.  He dedicated many books and poems to Frost, included countless Frost poems in his anthologies, enthusiastically reviewed his work, edited and commented on a volume of Frost’s letters to him, lectured on Frost at the Library of Congress, and for 25 years served as jury chairman of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry that awarded an amazing four prizes to Frost.  The beneficiary wryly remarked, “Sometimes I think I’m a sort of figment of Louis’ imagination.”

Despite their differences, both were devoted to Frost’s poetry.  Both men were mainly self-educated: Untermeyer had dropped out of high school, Frost never finished at two colleges.  They were unsuccessful farmers, and geriatric tennis partners at the Bread Loaf writers’ conference in Vermont.  Unlike most poets, the mediocre Untermeyer was not a rival or a threat.  Isolated in remote New England, Frost loved to hear Untermeyer’s lively, amusing and salacious accounts of New York literary gossip.  Like Shakespeare, Swift, Joyce and Nabokov, Untermeyer loved puns.  On one brilliant occasion—alluding to the poem “Annie Laurie” that begins “Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie”—Untermeyer actually brought two donkeys named Max and Welton all the way to Bread Loaf so the poets could hear their bonnie brays.

Untermeyer wrote that “even the countless honors that came later could never compensate for the long, lonely times when Frost had to suffer the humiliation of being a failure.  Frost was proud, troubled and frankly jealous in nature.  It took years for him to recover from the feeling that every living poet was his potential if not his actual rival.”  Frost “always held that we go forward as much by hating as by loving”.  Untermeyer, his rabbinical father-confessor, tempered Frost’s hostility to critics, soothed his disabling depressions, and tried to mollify the fierce Frost-bite on his real and imagined enemies.

Frost had a tragic life and desperately needed Untermeyer’s devoted and sympathetic friendship.  Untermeyer saw Frost’s four surviving offspring during his frequent visits, knew them well, and called these spoiled and socially maladjusted teenagers “the most obnoxious and unattractive children he had ever met”.  Frost’s first son lived for only three years.  His wife Elinor, on whom he depended for so much, survived breast cancer but died of a heart attack in 1938.  His sister Jeanie was confined to a state hospital for the insane.  His favourite daughter Marjorie died from an infection after giving birth.  His daughter Irma was mentally disturbed.  His only surviving son, Carol, was suicidal like Untermeyer’s son Richard, and shot himself, aged 38, on his Vermont farm in October 1940.

After the death of Elinor, when Frost was most emotionally vulnerable, his daughter Lesley cruelly accused him of being a bad husband and selfish father.  Devastated by her charges, Frost felt persecuted, rejected and despondent, and turned against the world.  Untermeyer rushed down from New York to Gainesville, Florida, to comfort and support him.  Always glad to be of use and encourage his dependence, he sometimes lent Frost money.  He was one of the pallbearers at Elinor’s funeral; arranged Lesley’s abortion in New York; and was Frost’s confidant about his secret love affair, after Elinor’s death, with Kay Morrison.

The friends had their only serious quarrel when Untermeyer worked for the Office of War Information, the government propaganda agency, during World War Two.  Frost rejected Untermeyer’s patriotic request to support the American war effort and called the war a futile example of “British inadequacy and American irrationality”.  Though Frost wrote advertisements for himself throughout his life, he nevertheless insisted that he was “nobody’s propagandist”.  To soothe Untermeyer’s anger about his refusal, Frost wrote a long apologetic poem, and Untermeyer answered gratefully and gracefully to end the dispute: “Once more, you accomplish that miraculous thing of saying profound things as though you were not saying anything at all, as though you were musing for the sake of musing—and being amusing.”

Frost repaid his friend’s vital assistance with absurd flattery and declared, “You have easily the best critical powers in our day.”  But he also felt that Untermeyer, with tremendous but misplaced energy, “could be run down by an automobile and then write a poem as the ambulance bore him off.  He writes with his coattails flying.”

Frost’s puritanical fascination with Untermeyer’s frantic fornication during and between his marriages was like Samuel Johnson’s vicarious pleasure and moral disapproval of James Boswell’s lubricious sex life.  Though Frost had frequently been embarrassed by the way Jean and Louis had tortured each other in his presence, he still felt they should remain miserably but loyally together.  After Untermeyer’s two divorces and self-punishing return to Jean, the monogamous Frost—with two divorced daughters—delivered a godlike condemnation: “My judgment on you is that you have wronged yourself in all this business of alternating between two wives.  You are back now where you started from [with Jean] and not one bit improved in mind or spirit.  The whole experiment has been a waste of time and energy” — the expense of spirit in a time of shame.  Unfortunately, Untermeyer was condemned to repeat the same mistakes instead of learning from them.

Untermeyer was a congenial, amusing, influential and useful companion.  Frost befriended and flattered him, made good use of him yet privately criticized his foolish vanity.  He absurdly called him one of our best poets.  He also noted the gross disparity between Untermeyer’s dismal talents and overweening ambition, and exclaimed that since the time of his first commercial anthology in 1919 Untermeyer “has been selling out to one thing after another”.  Frost manipulated him to his own advantage and without Untermeyer’s full awareness, and managed to retain his intellectual purity while benefitting from his friend’s enthusiastic advocacy.  Like Eliot’s Prufrock, Untermeyer was “Deferential, glad to be of use.
. . . Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.”

Note: Of 15 significant subjects who married the same person twice, nine made the same mistake and divorced them for the second time (Untermeyer, Dorothy Parker, Erich Remarque, Allen Tate, James Farrell, William Saroyan, Peter Viereck, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton); four remarriages ended in the early deaths of one spouse before the second divorce (Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo, Carson McCullers, Gregory Hemingway, Natalie Wood with Robert Wagner); and 2 remained uneasily married to their previous spouse (Freddie Ayer and Irwin Shaw).

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024.  Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway appeared in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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