- Robert Hillyer
Robert Silliman Hillyer (
June 3 ,1895 -December 24 ,1961 ) was an Americanpoet . He had long links toHarvard University , including holding a position as a Professor of English. He also taught atKenyon College and theUniversity of Delaware .He was born in
East Orange, New Jersey . He attendedKent School in Kent, Connecticut and graduated from Harvard in 1917 after which he went toFrance and volunteered with the S.S.U. 60 of theNorton-Harjes Ambulance Corps serving the Allied Forces inWorld War I .He was a brother of the Epsilon chapter of
St. Anthony Hall at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.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 ". "The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer" (1934) won thePulitzer Prize for Poetry in that year. Other works include "The Coming Forth by Day: An Anthology of Poems from theEgyptian Book of the Dead " (1923), the novel "Riverhead" (1932), and "In Pursuit of Poetry". American composerNed 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 theBollingen Controversy.Hillyer was identified with the
Harvard Aesthetes grouping.External links
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* [http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/hillyer.php Brief biography at HarvardSquareLibrary.org]
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