About Robert Hillyer
Robert Hillyer (June 3, 1895, East Orange, New Jersey; 24 December 1961 in Old Greenwich, Connecticut) was an American poet and professor of higher education. Hillyer attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, and attended Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1917. While there, he was the editor of the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate, and was affiliated with the group known as the Harvard Aesthetes. He then voluntarily joined the French front during the First World War for military service. He was professor of English literature from 1919 to 1920 and from 1928 to 1945 and also professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University in 1937. He also taught at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, from 1952 to 1961 at the University of Delaware.He was very conservative in his views and literary works. As controversial president of the Conservative Poetry Society of America, he attacked almost all modernists young poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. His poetry use meter and rhyme. He is also known for his sonnets and poems such as “Theme and Variations” (about his war experiences), as well as the letter to Robert Frost. American composer Ned Rorem performed Hillyers Poem Early in the Morning. In 1934, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer.
Hillyer had been married since 1926 and had a son. His literary estate is known as Hillyer Papers in the Syracuse University Library.
Browse all poems and texts published on Robert Hillyer
