Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

92 years is a good long life. Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977) began life in the Victorian Age, and lived through three-quarters of the 20th century.

Theodore Roosevelt published Hunting Trips of a Ranchman the year Untermeyer was born. He was 15 years old when Queen Victoria died, and President McKinley was assassinated the month before he turned 16.

He lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the inventions of electric light, the telephone, radio and television, automobiles, airplanes, the atom bomb, and the heady pioneering days of space travel. Medicine and Science progressed by leaps and bounds. The world also began groaning under the weight of an exploding human population, and the devastating side effects that are the unplanned-for price of all that progress.

In the midst of civilization’s constant change, Louis Untermeyer switched careers to become a one-man army advocating for poetry. There have been over 100 titles published that bear his name, some as the author and many as editor, compiler or translator.

His mother often read aloud to him, encouraging him to read and write at an early age. But he was also introduced to music as a child, and grew up wanting to be a concert pianist and composer.

It was not to be. His schooling was cut short just before high school graduation, and he went to work in his father’s jewelry business in 1903. (In 1965, he finally did get a high school diploma.) At age 22, he married Jean Starr, the first of his four wives.

Even while he worked in the family business, Untermeyer was still writing poetry. In 1911, he self-published a book of poems, First Love, and a book of poetic parodies, showing off both the serious and the punny side of his nature. He was also writing for left-wing and labor movement publications like The Masses. 

In 1914, he published his second book, a collection of protest poems called Challenge, which, with his writings for socialist and communist publications, would bring him in the 1950s to the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
_____________________________________________________________

CHALLENGE

The quiet and courageous night,
The keen vibration of the stars,
Call me, from morbid peace, to fight
The world’s forlorn and desperate wars.

The air throbs like a rolling drum
The brave hills and the singing sea,
Unrest and people’s faces come
Like battle-trumpets, rousing me.

And while Life’s lusty banner flies,
I shall assail, with raging mirth,
The scornful and untroubled skies,
The cold complacency of earth.

_____________________________________________________________

Continue reading →