It’s the birthday of Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), a poet, editor, and highly popular speaker best known as an anthologist who had a tremendous influence over poetry in the 20th century, introducing students to a wide variety of American poets and promoting the idea that poetry is accessible, not elitist.

Untermeyer was born in New York, New York, and loved poetry from a young age—everything from “Paul Revere’s Ride” to Dante’s Inferno. His father was a well-to-do jeweler, and after dropping out of high school because he hated math, he joined his father’s business and drew sketches of jewelry. He began publishing poetry, including his first collection, Challenge, in 1914, which many years later got him in minor trouble with the anti-Communists. (Untermeyer was liberal and the collection contained some social protest, but he did not promote any particular ideology.) In 1919 his first anthology was published, Modern American Poetry, which went through at least eight editions, and the anthology Modern British Poetry followed soon after (sources differ as to the exact year); many universities used these texts for years. Untermeyer was friends with many of the poets they featured, such as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. (See his book The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, which spanned over forty years of communication.) He quit the family business in 1923 and focused on his literary interests full time.

It would be impossible to list all of Untermeyer’s poetry collections, anthologies, and wives, but notable ones include A Treasury of Great Poems (1942) and Bryna Ivens, to whom he was married when he died. (Really, two or three wives is all I can keep track of on a dreary Monday morning.) Untermeyer was well-liked and loquacious, fun to be with, brilliant at parody, and named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1961-1963, a position later called Poet Laureate of the U.S.). He was a panelist on What’s My Line until he was kicked off for suspicion of Communist associations. Untermeyer died in Newtown, Connecticut, at the age of 92.

NB: Untermeyer had the longest sloping profile you will see in a good long while and wore pince-nez for years, and therefore looked satisfyingly scholarly (as you can see from this photo here).

Have a better Monday than the weather would lead you to expect, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.