Amos Wilder

Amos Niven Wilder was born in 1895 in Madison, Wisconsin. He served in World War I, first as a volunteer ambulance driver and later as a corporal in an artillery unit. After the war he received a BA, BD, and PhD from Yale University.

In 1923, Wilder published his first poetry collection, Battle Retrospect (Yale University Press), about his wartime experiences as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He went on to publish the poetry collections Grace Confounding (Fortress Press, 1972) and Arachne (Yale University Press, 1928), as well as several scholarly works of prose, including Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition (Scribner, 1952).

Wilder was ordained in 1926 and served at a Congregationalist church in New Hampshire. He taught at seminaries in Chicago before becoming a professor at the Harvard Divinity School in 1954. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1993. His memoir of World War I, Armageddon Revisited (Yale University Press, 1994) was published after his death.