Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895 – December 24, 1961) was an American poet and professor of English literature.

[2] When World War I began, he went to France and volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Harvard classmate John Dos Passos.

For a while Hillyer and John Dos Passos shared a flat in Paris and even collaborated on an unpublished novel which they called "Great Novel" (or "G.N.

[1][2][3] In the late 1920s, he taught at Trinity College and was made a member of the Epsilon chapter of the literary fraternity St. Anthony Hall in 1927.

[5] Over his academic life, Hillyer taught a number of writers (and poets) who later became well-known such as Theodore Roethke,[6] James Gould Cozzens, [7] Howard Nemerov, James Agee, Norman Mailer, Robert Fitzgerald and John Simon.

[1] He is known for his sonnets and for poems such as "Theme and Variations" (on his war experiences) and the light "Letter to Robert Frost."