Born in Windsor, Connecticut, he graduated from Yale in 1861, where he was Class Poet and a member of Skull and Bones.

[1]: 112  He engaged in business in California, and entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1867 but soon left for a position on the staff of the New York Evening Mail.

A biographical sketch in The Poetical Works of Edward Rowland Sill, edited by William Belmont Parker with Mrs Sill's assistance was printed in 1906, and his poem "The Fool's Prayer" (1879) was selected for inclusion in the Yale Book of American Verse in 1912.

[6] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "He was a modest and charming man, a graceful essayist, a sure critic.

His best poems, such as The Venus of Milo, The Fool's Prayer and Opportunity, gave him a high place among the minor poets of America, which might have been higher but for his early death."