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Robert Hillyer
1895–1961
A Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, he wrote with a strong belief in traditional verse and spent much of his life teaching literature as well as writing it. His work offers a clear window into one side of 20th-century poetry, especially the debate over form, tradition, and modernism.
1 Audiobook
The Five Books of Youth
by Robert Hillyer
About the author
Born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1895, Robert Silliman Hillyer studied at Kent School and then Harvard, where he edited The Harvard Advocate and graduated in 1917. During World War I, he volunteered in France with an ambulance unit before returning to an academic life.
Hillyer became known as both a poet and a professor of English literature, teaching at Harvard and later at other institutions including the University of Delaware. He published poetry, criticism, and fiction, but is best remembered for The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer, which won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
His poems often favored meter, rhyme, and other traditional forms, and he was an outspoken critic of literary modernism. That strong point of view made him a notable figure not just for his poems, but also for the arguments he brought to American literary life in the mid-20th century.