Jean Starr Untermeyer

Jean Starr Untermeyer (March 13, 1886 – July 27, 1970) was an American poet, translator, and educator. She was the author of six volumes of poetry and a memoir. She was married to the poet Louis Untermeyer from 1906 to 1926.

Biography Starr was born into a well-off Jewish family in Zanesville, Ohio, the daughter of Abram Starr and Johanna Starr (née Schonfeld), the oldest of three siblings. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Germany. When her husband read her poems he was impressed by them and, on her behalf, submitted them to several magazines that accepted them for publication; with his support, her first book of poems, Growing Pains, was published by B. W. Huebsch in 1918.

Jean and Louis Untermeyer reconciled several years later and remarried after Louis had been married and divorced a second time.

Later work Untermeyer continued to write poetry, publishing several further collections, including Winged Child (1936). Her poems are often traditional in form, with subtle, intricate harmonies;

Thrilled with the results, Broch urged Untermeyer to pursue a further career in translation. However, Untermeyer, exhausted by the process, refused and returned to her own poetry.

Teaching Untermeyer later taught at Olivet College, in Michigan, and at the New School for Social Research, in New York City.

Works Poetry collections Growing Pains (1918) Dreams Out of Darkness (1921) Steep Ascent (1927) The Winged Child (1936) Love and Need: Collected Poems, 1918–1940 (1940) Later Poems (1958) Job's Daughter (1967)

Memoir Private Collection (1965)

Translations Oscar Bie, Schubert, the Man (1928). Biography; translated from the German Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil (1945). Novel; translated from the German Recreations (1970). Translations of poems from the French, German, and Hebrew