Robert Hillyer
Robert Silliman Hillyer (1895-1961) was an influential American poet and educator known for his literary contributions and academic roles. Born in East Orange, New Jersey, he was proud of his English heritage and received his education at Kent School and Harvard University, where he graduated cum laude in 1916. Hillyer gained recognition early in his career, winning the Garrison Prize for Poetry and co-authoring the anthology "Eight Harvard Poets." He served in World War I, enlisting in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service and later joining the U.S. Army.
After the war, Hillyer returned to Harvard, where he taught English and published several poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning work in 1934. He held various academic positions, culminating in a professorship at the University of Delaware until his death. Hillyer's career was marked by his intellectual engagements with poetry politics, notably expressing strong criticism of the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound. His literary legacy includes a blend of traditional and contemporary poetic influences, reflecting his pride in both his heritage and educational background.
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Robert Hillyer
Poet
- Born: June 3, 1895
- Birthplace: East Orange, New Jersey
- Died: December 24, 1961
- Place of death: Newark, Delaware
Biography
Robert Silliman Hillyer was born on June 3, 1895, in East Orange, New Jersey, to James Rankin and Lillian Stanley Smith Hillyer. He would grow up proud of not only his English heritage—a descendant of John Hillyer, one of the 1630’s founders of Windsor, Connecticut—but of his traditional British schooling, which is renowned for its literary emphasis. It is likely he was also proud of his quick immersion into literary positions, for at Kent School in Connecticut, where he received his preparatory education, he was editor in chief of the school quarterly. Hillyer was also honorary editor of the Harvard Advocate and an editor of the Harvard Monthly while at the university, where fellow writers such as E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos contributed to the periodicals, and where Hillyer graduated cum laude in 1916.
The year before, he had won the Garrison Prize for Poetry, publishing his work in The New Republic. The year after, he published Eight Harvard Poets, with Cummings, Dos Passos, Damon, Stewart Mitchell, William Norris, Dudley Poore, and Cuthbert Wright. Also in 1917, Hillyer published his first poetry collection, though some would dub it “too English” for the contemporary world, and married Dorothy Stewart Mott, though they would divorce in 1923.
After Harvard, Hillyer enlisted, joining the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, where in France he ended up in the same unit as his friend and fellow writer, John Dos Passos. Though they planned another book together, this time with an antiwar tone, Hillyer dumped the project, leaving Dos Passos with usable material that became One Man’s Initiation-1917, his first book. Once the United States entered World War II, Hillyer transferred to the U.S. Army, serving as courier to the peace conference, and was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1919.
Returning to the United States and to Harvard, Hillyer began teaching English and publishing his first two collections of poetry, in 1920. He earned an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship in 1920, and spent that year and the next writing in Copenhagen, Denmark. Afterward, Hillyer returned to Harvard, where in 1922 he would befriend and mentor such undergraduates as James Gould Cozzens.
In 1925, Hillyer’s collection The Halt in the Garden was published in England and better received there than in America. Editor John Middleton Murry, for example, wrote in Adelphi that his work was “in open imitation of Shakespeare.” In 1926, Hillyer took a post as assistant professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and married prominent New Englander Dorothy Hancock Tilton of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Together they had one son, Stanley Hancock.
After editing with Odell Shepard Essays of Today in 1928 and after being awarded an honorary M.A. by Trinity, Hillyer returned to Harvard as an associate professor. Three years later, he worked again with Odell Shepard and also with Kenneth Ballard Murdock, producing Masterpieces of English and American Literature (1931). He published a novel in 1932, his poetry as a collection in 1933, and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for the collection in 1934, as well as attained the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory position at Harvard.
He returned to teaching at Harvard, where he stayed until he retired in 1945. After his divorce from Dorothy, in 1943, and following his retirement from Harvard, Hillyer was visiting professor at Kenyon College from 1948 to 1951. He continued to publish, and became involved intellectually in the politics of poetry, and prizes.
In 1948, the Library of Congress granted the first Bollingen award for the highest achievement of American poetry that year. It was awarded to Ezra Pound for The Pisan Cantos. Hillyer was enraged. How could a national institution award a work that “voiced blatant anti-Semitism, belittled the sacrifice of American soldiers, and was written by a man who had been convicted of treason for broadcasting anti-American sentiments over the radio from Italy during World War II”? Hillyer made his disapproval blatantly clear. The poet and proud former soldier finally relented, only to quieter work in 1952 as H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English Literature at the University of Delaware, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate and where he would remain until his death on Christmas Eve, 1961.