Louis Untermeyer was born October 1, 1885, in New York City, where he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine and New Jersey, ever since. His education was sketchy; his continued failure to comprehend algebra and geometry kept him from entering college. His one ambition was to become a composer. At sixteen he appeared as a pianist in semi-professional circles; at seventeen he entered his father’s jewelry manufacturing establishment, of which he became designer and factory manager. Untermeyer’s first volume was _The Younger Quire_ (1911), a twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology (_The Younger Choir_). It was issued anonymously and only one hundred copies were printed. Later in the same year, he published a sequence of some seventy lyrics entitled _First Love_ (1911) in which the influences of Heine, Henley and Housman were not only obvious but crippling. With the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume is devoid of character and, in spite of a certain technical facility, wholly undistinguished. It was with _Challenge_ (1914), now in its fourth edition, that the author first spoke in his own idiom. Although the ghost of Henley still haunts some of these pages, poems like “Summons,” “Landscapes” and “Caliban in the Coal Mines” show “a fresh and lyrical sympathy with the modern world.... His vision” (thus the Boston _Transcript_) “is a social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of the forces of justice.” _Challenge_ was succeeded by _These Times_ (1917), evidently an “interval” book which, lacking the concentration and unity of the better known collection, sought (not always successfully) for larger horizons. Certain poems (like “Swimmers,” “The Laughers” and the colloquial sonnets) stand out, but as a whole it has neither the energy of his earlier nor the surety of his later work. _The New Adam_ (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the varied passions are fused in a new heat. Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published two volumes of critical parodies, “_—— and Other Poets_” (1917) and _Including Horace_ (1919)—paraphrases of the Latin bard as various classic and modern poets might have rendered him. He has also printed a strict metrical translation of three hundred and twenty-five _Poems of Heinrich Heine_ (1917); a volume of prose criticism, _The New Era in American Poetry_ (1919); and two text-books. He was one of the Associate Editors of _The Seven Arts_ (1916-17) and has lectured at various universities in the Eastern States. SUMMONS