Robert Hillyer

Robert Hillyer

Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895 – December 24, 1961) was an American poet and professor of English literature. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934.

Early life

Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey to an old Connecticut family. He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. He also attended Harvard University, graduating cum laude in 1917. While there, he was the editor of the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate, and was affiliated with the group known as the Harvard Aesthetes.

When World War I began, he went to France and volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Harvard classmate John Dos Passos. Once the United States entered the war, he joined the American forces.

Career

Academic

Hillyer became professor of English at Harvard University in 1919, returning to Harvard again in 1926.

While teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the late 1920s, Hillyer was made a member of the Epsilon chapter of the literary fraternity St. Anthony Hall in 1927.

From 1937 to 1944, he was named to the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

From 1948 to 1951 Hillyer was a visiting professor at Kenyon College. He also taught at the University of Delaware from 1952 until his death. While at Delaware Hillyer did various regular poetry readings between 1953-1960. Several hours of audio were recorded from them and are available for listening from the U. of Delaware archives (MSS 0696).

While teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the late 1920s, Hillyer was made a member of the Epsilon chapter of the literary fraternity St. Anthony Hall in 1927.

Poetry

Hillyer described himself as “a conservative and religious poet in a radical and blasphemous age” in 1919.

In 1939, Hillyer, received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer. His work is in meter and often rhyme. He tended to write about death, love and nature. He is known for his sonnets and for such poems as "Theme and Variations" (on his war experiences) and the light "Letter to Robert Frost."

American composer Ned Rorem's most famous art song is a setting of Hillyer's "Early in the Morning".

Hillyer is remembered as a kind of villain by Ezra Pound scholars. They associated him with his 1949 criticism of The Pisan Cantos in the Saturday Review of Literature, which sparked the Bollingen controversy.

He became president of the Conservative Poetry Society of America. In this capacity, he attacked modernish poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Awards and honors

• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "Collected Verse" in 1934.
• His papers are housed at Syracuse University.

Works

Poetry

• The Collected Poems (Alfred Knopf, 1961)
• The relic & other poems. Knopf. 1957.
• The Suburb by the Sea: New Poems (Knopf, 1952)
• The Death of Captain Nemo: A Narrative Poem (A.A. Knopf, 1949)
• Poems for Music, 1917–1947. (1947)
• My Heart for Hostage (1942)
• Pattern of a Day (1940)
• In a Time of Mistrust (1939)
• A Letter to Robert Frost and Others (1937).
• The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer. (A. A. Knoft, 1933)
• The Coming Forth by Day: An Anthology of Poems from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. B.J. Brimmer Company. 1923.
• The Seventh Hill. New York: Viking Press. 1928.
• The Halt in the Garden (Elkin Matthews,1925)
• Hills Give Promise, a Volume of Lyrics, Together with Carmus: A Symphonic Poem (B.J. Brimmer Company, 1923)
• Alchemy: A Symphonic Poem (Kessinger Publishing, 1920)
• The Five Books of Youth (Brentano's, 1920)
• The Wise Old Apple Tree in the Spring (Harvard University of Press, 1917)
• Sonnets and Other Lyrics (Harvard University Press, 1917)
• Eight Harvard Poets (1917), which included work by E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos

Novels

• Riverhead (1932)
• My Heart for Hostage (1942)

Criticism

• In Pursuit of Poetry. McGraw-Hill. 1960.
• First Principles of Verse. The Writer, 1950.

Translations

• Oluf Friis (1922). A Book of Danish Verse: Translated in the Original Meters. Translators Samuel Foster Damon, Robert Hillyer. The American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Editors

• Kahlil Gibran (1959). Hayim Musa Nahmad, Robert Hillyer (ed.). A Tear and a Smile. A. A. Knopf.
• Samuel Foster Damon, Robert Hillyer, ed. (1923). Eight More Harvard Poets. Brentano's.

Personal

In 1926, he married Dorothy Hancock Tilton. They had one son, but divorced in 1943.

He was 66 when he died in Wilmington, Delaware.

See also

• List of ambulance drivers during World War I

External links

• Works by Robert Hillyer at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Robert Hillyer at the Internet Archive
• Works by Robert Hillyer at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• MSS 0696 - University of Delaware audio recordings of poetry readings. Audio of various poetry readings Hillyer gave between 1953-1960.