Robert Hillyer can best be described as a gentleman of letters. In a forty-year career he was not only a distinguished professor of English but also editor, translator, essayist, novelist, and author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry. His poetry chiefly explored the traditional forms--particularly the sonnet and lyric, but also the symphonic poem, narrative, and pastoral--and he consistently earned praise for his technical accomplishment.

Hillyer's poetry appeared at a time when American literature, and poetry in particular, was going through a period of dramatic change. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were in the foreground of movements that broke away from the late-romantic tradition and led to the development of the theories of the New Critics, with their emphasis on the autonomy of the work, independent of the writer's and the society's values. Hillyer spent much of his life battling these new forces, resisting what he...