Robert Hillyer

Robert Hillyer

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, after which 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 worked as a visiting professor at the Gambier Institution at Kenyon College and from there went to serve on the faculty at the University of Delaware.[1]

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, who associate him with his 1949 attacks on 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

Works

Poetry

Novels

Criticism

Translations

Editors

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Robert Hillyer, Pulitzer Poet". The Youngstown Vindicator. December 31, 1961. Retrieved December 26, 2012.
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Robert Hillyer
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/24/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.