George Dillon

Who was George Dillon?

George Hill Dillon was an American editor and poet. He was born in Jacksonville, Florida but he spent his childhood in Kentucky and the Mid-West. He graduated from The University of Chicago in 1927 with a degree in English. He was the editor for Poetry magazine from 1937 to 1949, during which time he also served in WWII as a member of the Signal Corps. Viewing, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the German Army being driven from Paris, he signaled, in Morse, "Paris is Free".

Though included in several contemporary anthologies, Dillon's works are largely out of print. Today he is perhaps best known as one of the many lovers of Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he met in 1928 at The University of Chicago, where she was giving a reading. Dillon was the inspiration for Millay's epic 52-sonnet sequence Fatal Interview and they later collaborated on translations from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in 1936.