Robert Hillyer

Robert Silliman Hiller (June 3, 1895 - December 24, 1961) was an American poet. Hillier was born in East Orange, New Jersey. He studied at the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard in 1917, after which he went to France and voluntarily collaborated with S.S.U. 60 from the Norton Harges ambulance corps serving the Allied forces in World War I. He had a long-standing relationship with Harvard University, including being a professor of English. From 1948 to 1951, Hillier was a visiting professor at Kenyon College and from there entered the faculty at the University of Delaware. While teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in the late 1920s, Hillier became a member of the epsilon head of the prestigious literary fraternity of St. Anthony Hall Delta Psi in 1927. His work is in meters and often rhymes. He is known for his sonnets and poems such as "Theme and Variations" (about his military experience) and the lightweight "Letter to Robert Frost." The most famous art song by American composer Ned Roram is the production of Hiller's Early Morning. Ezra Pound scholars remember Hiller as a kind of villain who links him to his 1949 attacks on Song of Songs in Saturday's Literature Review, which sparked a debate about the Bollingen. Hillier was identified with a group of Harvard Esthetes. He was 66 years old when he died in Wilmington, Delaware.