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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

Robert Hillyer

by Steven Brown

Other literary forms

Though a prolific poet, Robert Hillyer (HIH-lee-yur) published works in many other genres that were held in high esteem by academics. His publications include essays, translations, lyrics, criticism, book reviews, fiction, letters, lectures, and critical introductions to various anthologies. Accessibility remains the hallmark of both his art and academic writing, which is worth noting during a time when most writing, especially poetry, reflected the confusion of a violent era.

Achievements

Robert Hillyer’s crowning achievement was the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, which he received in 1934 for The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer. He also won the Garrison Prize for Poetry in 1916, the Award of the Lyric Associates in 1949 for The Death of Captain Nemo, and the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1953. The government of France honored him with the Verdun Medal upon his transfer to the U.S. Army after the United States entered World War I. He received a fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which allowed him to study at the University of Copenhagen, in 1920-1921, and honorary degrees from Trinity College and the University of Delaware. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1938 and served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1949 to 1961.

Biography

Robert Silliman Hillyer was born on June 3, 1895, in East Orange, New Jersey. Descended from one of Windsor, Connecticut’s founders, Hillyer maintained a lasting pride in his family’s heritage. The sense of benevolence that characterizes Hillyer’s poetry stems from this pride. Consequently, Hillyer was branded as a “genteel” and “conservative” poet by his contemporaries—a stigma rather than an honor—but such criticism did not hinder Hillyer’s success.

Hillyer’s nearly thirty-year relationship with Harvard University began when his previous writing experience at Kent landed him an editorship at the Harvard Advocate and Harvard Monthly. In 1916, he won the Garrison Prize for Poetry. In 1917, a selection of his poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets, an anthology containing the poems of Hillyer, E. E. Cummings, and six other poets. Soon after, Hillyer’s first collection of poems, Sonnets, and Other Lyrics, appeared. That year, he married Dorothy Stewart Mott; they were divorced in 1923.

The onset of World War I resulted in Hillyer taking a brief hiatus from academic work. After a short stint in the military as an ambulance driver, Hillyer returned to Harvard as an instructor, publishing The Five Books of Youth and Alchemy, both in 1920 and to mixed reviews. The Dial and The New York Evening Post Literary Review praised Hillyer’s technical precision but derided him for his conservative dogma and dated tropes. The Hills Give Promise, published three years later, marked Hillyer as a lyricist whose work would be adopted by renowned composer, Ned Rorem. In 1926, Hillyer married Dorothy Hancock Tilton; the couple would have one son before their divorce in 1943.

Hillyer is most remembered, however, for fueling the 1949 Bollingen Prize controversy. That year, the Library of Congress awarded Ezra Pound the prize for The Pizan Cantos (1948) despite Pound’s reputation as a fascist and anti-Semite. Hillyer was already opposed to free verse and its common dismissal of traditional craft, but Pound’s “hodge-podge of private symbols, weary epigrams, anecdotes, . . . and the polyglot malapropisms” coupled with his communist sympathies provoked Hillyer to action.

In June, 1949, Hillyer drafted two essays for the Saturday Review on the Bollingen scandal. “Treason’s Strange Fruit” and “Poetry’s New Priesthood” addressed in heated diatribe the issue of Pound’s racism and national disloyalties as well the convoluted nature of Pound’s poetics. Hillyer’s essays worked, at least partially. The Bollingen Prize was suspended, but Pound’s acolytes rallied, creating an imagist movement that has yet to subside in American poetics.

Though many artists defected to Pound’s camp, Hillyer remained resilient in his optimism and his advocacy of metrical verse. Unlike most poets, whose work diminishes as they age, Hillyer continued to write excellent poetry throughout his life. The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer won the poet the Pulitzer Prize in 1934; this was followed by his most recognized accomplishments: A Letter to Robert Frost and Others in 1937, Pattern of a Day in 1940, and The Relic, and Other Poems in 1957.

Hillyer retired from Harvard in 1945 but returned to teaching at Kenyon College in 1948. In 1953, he married Jeanne Hinternesch Duplaix. He eventually settled in a position at the University of Delaware, where, before his death in December of 1961, he wrote his final commentary on the state of poetics, In Pursuit of Poetry (1960), which was followed by his Collected Poems.

Analysis

Considered post-Romantic in an age when Romanticism seemed naïve and dangerously optimistic, Robert Hillyer clung to his genteel sense of hope with a fortitude that most twentieth century poets and critics found misguided. Instead of emphasizing the loss of innocence, Hillyer focused on a return to the bliss of boyhood, reversing the Romantic cycle, so that those caught up in the power struggle of “getting and spending” are led by Hillyer’s idylls back to the shepherd’s peaceable kingdom.

Some critics have dismissed Hillyer’s sonnets and pastoral meditations as simple, light verse; others have argued quite the opposite. The Times Literary Supplement once hailed the harmony extant in Hillyer’s lyrics as the guiding, divine memory of the past “amid the distraction and estrangement of this world.” Such harmony is complicated further by a sense of the sublime rooted in the earth.

In this duality of spiritual and natural inspiration, the twenty-first century reader may find a more relevant poet in Hillyer than in many of his contemporaries. Hope and nature are the driving themes behind the ecological movement in literature, chronicled by poets like Wendell Berry, W. S. Merwin, and Mary Oliver. As poets are constantly lost and found, Hillyer’s pastoral intellect re-emerges in the post-Pound era as a mediator between the people and the planet that sustains them.

The Seventh Hill

Noted by Louis Untermeyer as one of Hillyer’s best books and by Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska (A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940, 1946) as an example of Hillyer’s lyrical “mastery,” The Seventh Hill showcases two of Hillyer’s strongest forms: the sonnet and the pastoral.

The influence of classical literature saturates the poems in this book. The title of the collection alludes to the seven hills on which Rome was founded. Also, the poem “When I Say For Ever I Think of the Temple of Zeus” follows the theme of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

Hillyer later distances himself from Grecian platitudes. It is in the “Pastorals” section of The Seventh Hill that Hillyer’s clarity and resonance as a poet who “shares” himself with nature can be experienced without heavy allusion. In the first poem in that section, he writes: “The final music is not yet;/ But when it shakes eternal skies/ I would not have you forget/ The music of the mortal dream/ We shared in joy, though not for long.”

As the quote above suggests, music is key to Hillyer’s vision and defense of poetry. What many critics regard as singsong in terms of rhyme and meter, Hillyer deliberately incorporates for richer “overtones of meaning.” Music gives body to the sublime, as Hillyer states in First Principles of Verse (1950): “It is essential that the poet run the spiritual risk of yielding completely to the impulse which is trying to make him its instrument.” The reward for such risk is immortality, but not for the physical poet, as The Seventh Hill suggests: “When they are done/ And death/ Scatters the final blast they dinned,/ The lute still whispers in the wind.”

A Letter to Robert Frost and Others

Though Hillyer’s Collected Verse secured the Pulitzer Prize, A Letter to Robert Frost and Others markedly increased his fame. Modeled after the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733-1734), A Letter to Robert Frost and Others flaunts Hillyer’s wit and satirical prowess. His poem “A Letter to a Teacher of English”—addressed to his friend, Harvard professor James Buell Munn—contains some of Hillyer’s most frequently quoted lines:

   How often do I see in our profession

   Learning a mere extraneous possession

   . . . . . . . . .

   Where scholars prepare scholars, not for life

   But gaudy footnotes and a threadbare wife—

   . . . . . . . . .

   O that our living literature could be

   Our sustenance, not archaeology!

Such passion for the arts is often subdued in Hillyer’s poems by his defiance of social change, as told in “A Letter to Robert Frost.” Hillyer sees himself and his friend as “Two poets whose affection does not change;/ Immune to all the perils Nature sends,/ World war and revolution and kind friends.” Of course, it is this immunity to change for which Hillyer was so often chided. In the face of economic collapse and two devastating world wars, Hillyer’s hymns of exuberance offended the reigning and pessimistic avant-garde. Herein, however, lies Hillyer’s strength as a poet: his ability to convert the negative energy of his critics into the positive force behind books such as Pattern of a Day.

Pattern of a Day

Both A Letter to Robert Frost and Others and Pattern of a Day have solidified Hillyer’s place as a major poet in American literature; however, Pattern of a Day is considered by some to be Hillyer’s highest achievement. The book opens with, “Clear Melody,” a reply to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Instead of the tired mortality that Frost evokes in the repeated line “miles to go before I sleep,” Hillyer offers the “clear melody” of heaven here and now: “Sleep, you are there,/ Sleep, you are home,/ The moonlight comb/ Combs your hair./ And now you are home.” Home, in Hiller’s compound sense of the celestial and the terrestrial, is where “One cricket weaves the winds together.” The vision continues in “Hylidae,” where the tree toads are “Singing and dreaming of tall trees beyond” and the mind, “overwhelmed by sense,” hears “eternity in the present tense”—an homage to William Blake’s philosophy of a “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour.”

The “pattern” in Pattern of a Day can be found in the final suite of sonnets entitled, “In Time of Mistrust.” Not to be moved or disillusioned by the twentieth century’s “waste land,” Hillyer beckons the reader to the fulfillment of the “search” in the sixth sonnet of this series: the search for “spiritual joy,” for the “freedom of the disciplined,” for the “wisdom” that finds “. . . refuge from turmoil,—/ . . . for those who must/ Preserve some pattern for the whirling dust.” Of course, humankind is the pattern of the whirling dust. Hillyer argues that to be worthy of a beyond, certain criteria must be met that are inextricably linked to a fidelity to one another and to the earth.

This theme of fidelity is the outcome of a lifetime’s meditation on love and relationships. The rose-colored tropes of Hillyer’s earliest works find sustenance in Pattern of a Day, where the abstract is bolstered to the concrete and the “Trees . . ./ Are leafed with light” (“Clear Melody”).

For critics, Hillyer’s conservative and later “suburban” vision always verged on the contrived. However, such contrivances upheld Hillyer’s convictions toward that which he thought immutable in poetic craft: the music of language. If history is defined by society’s resistance to change, then Hillyer remains a defining literary figure. His stalwart optimism engages the twentieth century’s rage and disillusionment without fear, and his poems continue to resonate with those inclined toward the betterment of humanity.

Bibliography

1 

Hart, Paula L. “Robert (Silliman) Hillyer.” In American Poets, 1880-1945, Third Series, edited by Peter Quartermain. Vol. 54 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987.

2 

Library of Congress, Fellows in American Letters. The Case Against the “Saturday Review” of Literature: The Attack of the “Saturday Review” on Modern Poets and Critics. Chicago: Poetry, 1949. This work is the Library of Congress’s response to Hillyer’s criticisms; it also contains letters and essays by other poets.

3 

Perkins, David, ed. A History of Modern Poetry from the 1890’s to the High Modernist Mode. 1976. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Places Hillyer firmly within the conservative tradition that resisted the imagist movement of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.

4 

Stanlis, Peter J. “Robert Frost and Robert Hillyer: An Enduring Friendship.” In His “Incalculable” Influence on Others: Essays on Robert Frost in Our Time, edited by Earl J. Wilcox. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Series, University of Victoria, 1994. Stanlis examines the relationship between Robert Frost and Hillyer and their regard for each other.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Brown, Steven. "Robert Hillyer." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPAM_11530169000148.
APA 7th
Brown, S. (2011). Robert Hillyer. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Brown, Steven. "Robert Hillyer." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.