Robert Hillyer

Template:Short description Template:Infobox writer Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895 – December 24, 1961) was an American poet and professor of English literature.<ref name="Vindicator obit">Template:Cite news</ref> He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934.<ref name="Vindicator obit" />

Early life

Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey, to an old Connecticut family.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=":1">Template:Cite web</ref> He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. After high school, he attended Harvard University, graduating cum laude in 1917.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /> While there, he was the editor of the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate, and was affiliated with the group known as the Harvard Aesthetes.<ref name=":0" />

When World War I began, he went to France and volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Harvard classmate John Dos Passos.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /><ref name=":0" /> Once the United States entered the war, he joined the American forces.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /> After serving as an ambulance driver, Hillyer later returned to France to work in the US Ordnance Department.<ref name="hillyer-biography">Template:Cite web</ref> After the Armistice, Hillyer worked as a military courier for the 1919 peace conference in Paris. For a while Hillyer and John Dos Passos shared a flat in Paris and even collaborated on an unpublished novel which they called "Great Novel" (or "G.N.", or "Seven Times round the Walls of Jericho"). Eventually the novel was abandoned in 1921 even though Dos Passos said that Hillyer's contributions had "genuineness" and "more tone than mine."

Career

Academic

Hillyer became a professor of English at Harvard University in 1919.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /><ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> 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.<ref name=":0" /> From 1948 to 1951 Hillyer was a visiting professor at Kenyon College.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /> He also taught at the University of Delaware from 1952 until his death.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /> While at Delaware Hillyer did various regular poetry readings between 1953 and 1960 which were recorded and are now available for listening through the university's archives.<ref>MSS 0696 - University of Delaware audio recordings of poetry readings , accessed Feb 26 2021</ref>

Over his academic life, Hillyer taught a number of writers (and poets) who later became well-known such as Theodore Roethke,<ref name="roethke">Template:Cite web</ref> James Gould Cozzens,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Howard Nemerov, James Agee, Norman Mailer, Robert Fitzgerald and John Simon.<ref name="blazek">Template:Cite book</ref>

Poet

In 1919, Hillyer described himself as “a conservative and religious poet in a radical and blasphemous age."<ref name=":1" /> In 1934, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /><ref name=":0" /> His work is in meter and often rhyme and he tended to write about death, love and nature.<ref name="Vindicator obit" /> 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.<ref name=":1" /> In this capacity, he attacked modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.<ref name=":1" />

Awards and honors

• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "Collected Verse" in 1934.<ref name=":1" />
• He was named to the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University in 1937.<ref name=":0" />
• His papers are housed at Syracuse University.<ref name=":1" />

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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• The Collected Poems (Alfred Knopf, 1961)<ref name="Vindicator obit" />
• The Relic & Other Poems (Knopf, 1957).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Suburb by the Sea: New Poems (Knopf, 1952)<ref name=":0" />
• The Death of Captain Nemo: A Narrative Poem (A.A. Knopf, 1949)<ref name="Vindicator obit" /><ref name=":0" />
• Poems for Music, 1917–1947. (1947)<ref name="Vindicator obit" />
• Pattern of a Day (1940)<ref name=":0" />
• In a Time of Mistrust (1939)<ref name=":0" />
• A Letter to Robert Frost and Others (1937).<ref name=":0" />
• The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer. (A. A. Knoft, 1933)<ref name=":0" />
• The Gates of the Compass: A Poem in Four Parts Together with Twenty-Two Shorter Pieces (Viking Press, 1930)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Seventh Hill (Viking Press, 1928)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Halt in the Garden (Elkin Matthews,1925)<ref name=":0" />
• The Coming Forth by Day: An Anthology of Poems from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (B.J. Brimmer Company, 1923)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Hills Give Promise, a Volume of Lyrics, Together with Carmus: A Symphonic Poem (B.J. Brimmer Company, 1923)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Alchemy: A Symphonic Poem (Brentano's, 1920)<ref name=":0" />
• The Five Books of Youth (Brentano's, 1920)<ref name=":0" />
• Sonnets and Other Lyrics (Harvard University Press, 1917)<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />
• Eight Harvard Poets (1917), which included works by E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos<ref name=":0" />

Novels

• Riverhead (Alfred Knopf, 1932)<ref>Hillyer, Robert. Riverhead. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1932. via Google Books.</ref>
• My Heart for Hostage (Random House, 1942)<ref>Hillyer, Robert, 1895-1961. My Heart for Hostage. New York: Random House, 1942. via Hathi Trust.</ref> In 2022 this novel was digitized and made available for free download by Personville Press.<ref name="free-hostage">Template:Cite web</ref>

Criticism and scholarship

• In Pursuit of Poetry (McGraw-Hill, 1960)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>*
• First Principles of Verse. (The Writer, Inc., 1938).<ref name="Vindicator obit" />
• Some Roots of English Poetry (Wheaton College Press, 1933)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Editor and/or translator

• Template:Cite book<ref name=":1" />
• Kahlil Gibran. A Tear and a Smile.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Introduction by Robert Hillyer. (A. A. Knopf, 1959).<ref>Gibran, Kahlil. 1965. A tear and a smile. Translated from Arabic by H.M. Nahmad, with an introduction by Robert Hillyer. New York: Knopf.</ref>
• Eight More Harvard Poets. Edited by Samuel Foster Damon and Robert Hillyer. (Brentano, 1923)<ref>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.</ref>
• 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.<ref name=":1" /> They had one son, but divorced in 1943.<ref name=":1" />

He was 66 when he died in Wilmington, Delaware.<ref name="Vindicator obit" />

See also

• List of ambulance drivers during World War I

External links

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• Robert Hillyer: Recordings of Poets Reading their Own Poems
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• MSS 0696 - University of Delaware audio recordings of poetry readings. Audio of various poetry readings Hillyer gave between 1953 and 1960.
• Digital Works by Robert Hillyer on Project Gutenberg