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. He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. After high school, he attended Harvard University, graduating cum laude in 1917. 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 For a while, Hillyer and John Dos Passos shared a flat in Paris and even collaborated on an unpublished novel which they called "Great Novel" (or "G.N.", or "Seven Times round the Walls of Jericho").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.

Over his academic life, Hillyer taught several writers (and poets) who later became well-known such as Theodore Roethke, James Gould Cozzens, Howard Nemerov, James Agee, Norman Mailer, Robert Fitzgerald and John Simon.

Poet In 1919, Hillyer described himself as “a conservative and religious poet in a radical and blasphemous age." The Collected Poems (Alfred Knopf, 1961) The Suburb by the Sea: New Poems (Knopf, 1952) The Seventh Hill (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 (Brentano's, 1920) My Heart for Hostage (Random House, 1942) In 2022, this novel was digitized and made available for free download by Personville Press.

Criticism and scholarship In Pursuit of Poetry (McGraw-Hill, 1960) * First Principles of Verse. (The Writer, Inc., 1938).

Editor and/or translator Introduction by Robert Hillyer. (A. A. Knopf, 1959). Eight More Harvard Poets. Edited by Samuel Foster Damon and Robert Hillyer. (Brentano, 1923) 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.