Robert Hillyer
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Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895 – December 24, 1961) was an American poet.
Life[]
Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey. He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard in 1917. With the Great War having begun, he went to France and volunteered with the S.S.U. 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, serving the Allied Forces in World War I. He had long links to Harvard University, including holding a position as a Professor of English.
From 1948 to 1951 Hillyer was a visiting professor at Kenyon College; he next served with the faculty at the University of Delaware.[1] During his work at U. of 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).[2]
While teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the late 1920s, Hillyer was made a member of the Epsilon chapter of the prestigious St. Anthony Hall Delta Psi literary fraternity in 1927.
His work is in meter and often rhyme. 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.
Hillyer was identified with the Harvard Aesthetes grouping.
He was 66 when he died in Wilmington, Delaware.[1]
Awards[]
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "Collected Verse" in 1934.
Works[]
Poetry[]
- The Collected Poems. 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. A. A. Knopf. 1947.
- The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer. A.A. Knopf. 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.
- Hillyer, Robert (1925). Halt in the Garden (1st ed.). London, UK: Elkin Matthews. p. 48.
- Hillyer, Robert (1920). Alchemy: A Symphonic Poem. Illustrator Beatrice Stevens. Kessinger Publishing, LLC.
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- Hillyer, Robert (1923). Hills give promise,a volume of lyrics, together with Carmus: a symphonic poem (1st ed.). Boston, MA: B. J. Brimmer company. p. 160. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
- Hillyer, Robert (1920). The Five Books of Youth. Brentano's.
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- Hillyer, Robert (1917). Sonnets and Other Lyrics. Harvard University Press.
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- Hillyer, Robert (1917). The Wise Old Apple Tree in the Spring. Harvard University Press.
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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.
See also[]
References[]
- ^ Jump up to: a b "Robert Hillyer, Pulitzer Poet". The Youngstown Vindicator. December 31, 1961. Retrieved December 26, 2012.
- ^ MSS 0696 - University of Delaware audio recordings of poetry readings , accessed Feb 26 2021
External links[]
Wikisource has original works written by or about: Robert Hillyer |
- Works by Robert Hillyer at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Robert Hillyer at Internet Archive
- Works by Robert Hillyer at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Brief biography at HarvardSquareLibrary.org
- Author page at the Poetry Foundation, with eight poems
- MSS 0696 - University of Delaware audio recordings of poetry readings. Audio of various poetry readings Hillyer gave between 1953-1960.
- 1895 births
- 1961 deaths
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners
- American Field Service personnel of World War I
- 20th-century American poets
- Danish–English translators
- Harvard University alumni
- Harvard University faculty
- Kent School alumni
- Kenyon College faculty
- Writers from East Orange, New Jersey
- University of Delaware faculty
- 20th-century translators