The Healing of the Waters

Amos Wilder's poetry drew from an inexhaustible well of his Christian belief in the destiny of man and nature, seeking always to find fresh ways and language to invoke the imperatives of faith and spiritual life in a modern era. This collection of thirty-five poems, the third of Amos Wilder's four books of published poetry, appeared in 1942 in the midst of World War II. Shaping it to speak to a world in crisis, Wilder included five poems republished from his first volume of poetry (Battle-Retrospect, 1923) and twelve poems from his second, (Arachne, 1928, with two major poems revised), both conceived under the long shadow of World War I, a war in which he had fought. The last poem written for this collection, "Homage," is dedicated to his bother Thornton ("to T. N. W., 1942"), then serving with US Army Air Force Intelligence in North Africa.