By Robert Nagle
From Pre-Pulitzer Poetry by Robert HIllyer
This ebook collects several poetry books which Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) published during the 1920s.
I recently edited a critical ebook edition of Robert Hillyer’s 1942 novel My Heart for Hostage, which led me to explore all of Hillyer’s poetry. I wrote a long biographical sketch of Hillyer’s life and works which you can find on the Personville Press website and at this web address.
Before Hillyer’s Collected Verse won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934, Hillyer had published 6 poetry books and 2 translations. Three of these poetry books (Alchemy, Carmus and Gates of the Compass) were longer narrative poems which Hillyer called “symphonic poems.” The first two symphonic poems (Alchemy and Carmus) contained beautiful illustrations by Beatrice Stevens. Ultimately I decided to omit Alchemy (1920) from this ebook because the large number of illustrations in Alchemy would make this ebook have an unwieldy file size. You can still view a free PDF scan of Alchemy on archive.org, and eventually Personville Press will release an ebook version of it as well. Carmus is still a terrific read and contains the original illustrations; the story is a haunting fairy tale for adults full of beautiful imagery and sentences. (I personally found it helpful to read the poem synopsis before diving into the poem, but some might prefer skipping it).
Seventh Hill appears first in this ebook even though it was the last to be published. I mostly tried to replicate the original sequence of the poems as they appeared in each book. Carmus was published together in the same volume as The Hills Give Promise, but that was probably done more for the publisher’s convenience than for artistic reasons. That is why they appear here as separate books.
Instead of listing each individual poem in the table of contents, this ebook lists poems at the top of the appropriate book section. At the end there is an Index of First Lines which should make it easy to look up a poem. There is a small number of notes and commentaries about individual poems which mainly pertain to textual discrepancies and perhaps relevant biographical details. By now, there are many online resources for looking up literary and mythological references (as I had to do for Hesperides in the poem titled “Halt in the Garden”), so there is rarely a need to mention them here.
In several cases, I added brief explanatory notes of a sentence or two in each section. Short notes are indicated with brackets […] to make it clear that they did not appear in the original books. Some poems translated for the Book of Danish Verse have never before been translated in English and their creators are probably unknown to English-speaking readers. For this reason, this ebook includes a 1-2 sentence biographical profile about these poets .
Audio Recordings. The Robert Hillyer page on Wikipedia also links to two audio recordings of Hillyer reciting his own poetry in the 1950s: University of Delaware recordings of audio readings (MSS 0696) and a recording of Hillyer reading his own poems at the Library of Congress (PL 25) on archive.org. The University of Delaware recordings include Hillyer reciting a mix of original poems along with many of his favorite poems from previous centuries.
Layout & Presentation
When publishing poetry ebooks, it can be a challenge to convey line breaks and indents in accordance with the poet’s wishes (especially when the poet is no longer around). It can sometimes be ambiguous in the printed edition whether the stanza ends at the bottom of the page or at the beginning of the next. Hillyer’s rhyme and meter is fairly regular and predictable, so in most cases it can be easy to figure out these things. Some poems use indents and occasionally an indent is used for special emphasis or echo of a previous line.
Line length varies from poem to poem, but many of Hillyer’s poems have passages with long lines (sometimes 10 syllables or more). On an ebook, if a line exceeds the length of the screen, it appears as a runon which will be indented. (This may happen a lot if reading in a very small display). 95% of the time, you can tell the difference between an actual indented line (and not simply a continuation of a previous line) by checking if the 2nd line is capitalized (which indicates a planned indent). My best advice would be to try to read this ebook on a larger screen; if this is not possible, try to reduce font size as much as your eyes allow. If you discover any formatting problems or any other quality problems, feel free to drop me a line.
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About the Author
ROBERT HILLYER (1895-1961) was a U.S. poet who published 15 books of poetry, 2 novels and 2 books of criticism. He volunteered with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France during World War 1 and worked as a diplomatic courier during the 1919 Paris peace conference after the war. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1934. Born in New Jersey, he taught at Harvard University, Trinity College, Kenyon College and University of Delaware. He is known for his traditional approach to poetry, classical poetic forms, pastoral themes and a rejection of Modernist innovations like free verse. (Read a biographical sketch of Hillyer and Robert Hillyer wikipedia page. cultural tolerance (Rabelais would certainly approve).“
ROBERT NAGLE wrote the introduction to Pre-Pulitzer Poetry and edited and formatted the ebook. He is a fiction writer and literary critic living in Houston, Texas. He founded Personville Press. His essay collection, NONCRAPPY THINGS FROM MY BLOG will be published in late 2027. His monthly web column, Robert’s Roundup of Indie Ebook Deals publicizes outstanding and affordable fiction being published today.
