Background
Robert Silliman Hillyer was born on June 3, 1895 in East Orange, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of James Rankin Hillyer and Lillian Stanley Smith.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Danish-Verse-Primary-Source/dp/1287838871?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1287838871
(Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic boo...)
Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic book titles. Our aim is to provide readers with the highest quality reproductions of fiction and non-fiction literature that has stood the test of time. The many thousands of books in our collection have been sourced from libraries and private collections around the world.The titles that Trieste Publishing has chosen to be part of the collection have been scanned to simulate the original. Our readers see the books the same way that their first readers did decades or a hundred or more years ago. Books from that period are often spoiled by imperfections that did not exist in the original. Imperfections could be in the form of blurred text, photographs, or missing pages. It is highly unlikely that this would occur with one of our books. Our extensive quality control ensures that the readers of Trieste Publishing's books will be delighted with their purchase. Our staff has thoroughly reviewed every page of all the books in the collection, repairing, or if necessary, rejecting titles that are not of the highest quality. This process ensures that the reader of one of Trieste Publishing's titles receives a volume that faithfully reproduces the original, and to the maximum degree possible, gives them the experience of owning the original work.We pride ourselves on not only creating a pathway to an extensive reservoir of books of the finest quality, but also providing value to every one of our readers. Generally, Trieste books are purchased singly - on demand, however they may also be purchased in bulk. Readers interested in bulk purchases are invited to contact us directly to enquire about our tailored bulk rates.
https://www.amazon.com/book-Danish-verse-James-Bennett/dp/0649762827?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0649762827
Robert Silliman Hillyer was born on June 3, 1895 in East Orange, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of James Rankin Hillyer and Lillian Stanley Smith.
Hillyer was educated at the Kent School, Connecticut, and received his Bachelor of Arts cum laude from Harvard in 1917. He won the undergraduate Garrison Prize for poetry in 1916 and in February of that year published a poem, "To a Scarlatti Passepied, " in the New Republic.
During 1920-1921 he studied in Copenhagen as a fellow of the American-Scandinavian Foundation.
In 1917 Hillyer published his first volume of poetry, Sonnets and Other Lyrics, verses in the Elizabethan tradition. Upon graduation Hillyer joined the American Field Service for ambulance duty with the French Army, for which he was awarded the Verdun Medal. Then, transferring to the American Army, he served as a courier at the Peace Conference. He was discharged a first lieutenant in 1919, whereupon he joined the Harvard English faculty as an instructor.
In 1926 he became assistant professor at Trinity College and in 1928 he returned to Harvard as associate professor. In 1937 he became Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and retained the chair until his retirement in 1945. Hillyer published seven volumes of verse, beginning with The Five Books of Youth (1920) and Alchemy (1920) and including Collected Verse (1933). He also published three novels, The Happy Episode (1927), Riverhead (1932), and My Heart for Hostage (1942), all of them delicately written, slightly plotted, and autobiographical. In 1922, with S. Foster Damon and Oluf Friis he published A Book of Danish Verse. His First Principles of Verse (1938) became a popular textbook. Later critics have described Hillyer as a poet who was in, but not of, his time.
In 1942 he became chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 1949 and 1951-1953 he was president of the Poetry Society of America. He was Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Tufts (1924), Harvard (1929), Columbia (1936), Harvard (1936), William and Mary (1938), and Goucher (1940), and he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hillyer was married three times, first to Dorothy Stewart Mott in 1917, then to Dorothy Hancock Tilton on July 1, 1926. Both marriages ended in divorce.
After his retirement from Harvard to write and to sail his sloop Gloriana (named for Elizabeth I), he was visiting professor of English at Kenyon College from 1948 to 1951 and H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English Literature at the University of Delaware from 1952 until his death, in Delaware.
In his last years Hillyer published The Death of Captain Nemo (1949), a narrative poem described by Peter Viereck as "part of our twentieth-century addition to the continuous stream of English literature"; The Suburb by the Sea (1952); The Relic and Other Poems (1957); In Pursuit of Poetry (1960), a collection of critical essays; and Collected Poems (1961). These last works demonstrate Hillyer's nature as a poet and a man and reveal his commitment to his craft, to his origins, and to his faith in man's ultimate triumph.
(Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic boo...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Hillyer was an Episcopalian.
Hillyer was a Republican.
During the 1930s he came under attack by left-wing critics for his refusal to man the political and social barricades and to celebrate the proletariat. Hillyer refused to reply to such charges. He spent increasing amounts of time in "those moments of contemplation more than ever necessary to a conservative and religious poet in a radical and blasphemous age. " Yet, he was shocked and offended by the announcement in 1949 of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry by the Library of Congress to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos. Pound had been indicted for treason after World War II for his wartime broadcasts in support of the Axis. Hillyer declared that "it is by my authority as a citizen that I protest. A scandalous thing has been done in the name of my Library of Congress!" In his published essay on the subject, "Treason's Strange Fruit, " in the Saturday Review of Literature for June 11, 1949, he mounted an attack on the award (named after Carl Jung's Swiss home), on Jung's early Nazi sympathies, on Pound's anti-Semitism, and on the Cantos, "so disordered as to make the award seem like a hoax. " He declared Pound's poems to be "vehicles of contempt for America, Fascism, anti-Semitism, and, in the Prize-winning 'Pisan Cantos' themselves, ruthless mockery of our Christian war dead. "
He concluded with an attack upon the Bollingen jury made up of Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters, and especially upon T. S. Eliot, like Pound an expatriate American and, according to Hillyer, an anti-Semite and the possessor of "a stranglehold on American poetry through the so-called 'new criticism. '" While the controversy raged amid congressional demands for an investigation, Hillyer followed the attack on the award to Pound with an attack the following week on "Poetry's New Priesthood" in the Saturday Review of Literature. Focusing on Eliot and the new criticism as elements "sufficiently stagnant to serve as a breeding place for influences so unwholesome as to permit the award to Pound, " he denounced the tendency of the modernists to "stuff their text with oddments chosen from other writers without quotation marks or explanation" and their subsequent movement into "semantics and private unintelligibility. " Hillyer concluded the article with the statement that "an uncompromising assault on the new estheticism is long overdue. " He carried on the attack in "The Crisis in American Poetry" in The American Mercury (January 1950), attacking "the school of Eliot as characterized by stagnation and obscurity. " His charges triggered the most vociferous poetic debate since the emergence of Walt Whitman. Hillyer's was the first serious questioning of the modernists, and it marked the beginning of the decline of the new criticism that had overthrown Marxist criticism with its own doctrinaire aestheticism. Hillyer did, however, see hope for the future in the works of such younger poets as Louis Simpson.
Hillyer was a highly civilized man. As a poet he found his subject matter in what he considered the eternal verities of love, death, and honor. He wrote with restraint and saw himself as a spokesman for human dignity. Unfriendly critics insisted that he was a prisoner of the form and ideas of a dead tradition, insensitive to the social issues of the modern world.
On September 3, 1953, Hillyer married Jeanne Hinternesch Duplaix.
He had one son, born of the second marriage with Dorothy Hancock Tilton.