Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895 – December 24, 1961) was an American poet and professor of English literature.
Early life
Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey, to an old Connecticut family.
He attended
Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. After high school, he 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.
Career
Academic
Hillyer became a professor of English at Harvard University in 1919.
In the late 1920s, he taught at Trinity College and 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.[ MSS 0696 - University of Delaware audio recordings of poetry readings , accessed Feb 26 2021]
Over his academic life, Hillyer taught a number of writers (and poets) who later became well-known such as Theodore Roethke,
Poet
In 1919, Hillyer described himself as “a conservative and religious poet in a radical and blasphemous age."
In 1934, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book
The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer.
His work is in meter and often rhyme and he tended to write about death, love and nature.
He is known for his sonnets and for poems such as "Theme and Variations" (on his war experiences) and the light "Letter to Robert Frost."
He became president of the Conservative Poetry Society of America.
Awards and honors
-
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "Collected Verse" in 1934.
-
He was named to the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University in 1937.
-
His papers are housed at Syracuse University.
Works
Poetry
-
Pre-Pulitzer Poetry (Ebook, Personville Press, 2023). Includes the full text of 6 poetry books published by Hillyer before winning the Pulitzer Prize.
-
The Collected Poems (Alfred Knopf, 1961)
-
(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)
-
Pattern of a Day (1940)
-
In a Time of Mistrust (1939)
-
A Letter to Robert Frost and Others (1937).
-
. (A. A. Knoft, 1933)
-
(Viking Press, 1930)
-
(Viking Press, 1928)
-
The Halt in the Garden (Elkin Matthews,1925)
-
The Coming Forth by Day: An Anthology of Poems from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (B.J. Brimmer Company, 1923)
-
Hills Give Promise, a Volume of Lyrics, Together with Carmus: A Symphonic Poem (B.J. Brimmer Company, 1923)
-
(Brentano's, 1920)
-
(Brentano's, 1920)
-
(Harvard University Press, 1917)
-
(1917), which included works by E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos
Novels
-
Riverhead (Alfred Knopf, 1932)
[Hillyer, Robert. Riverhead. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1932. via Google Books.]
-
My Heart for Hostage (Random House, 1942)
[Hillyer, Robert, 1895-1961. My Heart for Hostage. New York: Random House, 1942. via Hathi Trust.] In 2022 this novel was digitized and made available for free download by Personville Press.
Criticism and scholarship
-
(McGraw-Hill, 1960)
-
. (The Writer, Inc., 1938).
-
(Wheaton College Press, 1933)
Editor and/or translator
-
-
Kahlil Gibran. A Tear and a Smile.
[Gibran, Kahlil. 1965. A tear and a smile. Translated from Arabic by H.M. Nahmad, with an introduction by Robert Hillyer. New York: Knopf.]
-
Eight More Harvard Poets. Edited by Samuel Foster Damon and Robert Hillyer. (Brentano, 1923)
[Damon, S. Foster, Robert Hillyer, Dorian Abbott, Norman Cabot, Grant Code, Malcolm Cowley, Jack Mereten, Joel T. Rogers, Royall H. Snow, and John Brooks. 1923. Eight more Harvard poets.]
-
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and The Complete Poetry of William Blake, Introduction by Robert Hillyer, Random House: New York, 1941. pages xv-lv.
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
