'Thinking of Young Men Whom I Had Known'

In 1943, at age forty-three, Yvor Winters was safely beyond draft age but tried to secure a commission in the U.S. Army. He was turned down because of the tuberculosis contracted more than twenty years earlier. A guilty sense of patriotic obligation nagged him. While teaching at Stanford, he joined the Citizens’ Defense Corps and served as its zone warden for Los Altos, Calif., where he lived. The Corps was organized in 1941 as an emergency war agency and some 11 million American civilians volunteered. In a May 10, 1943, letter to his friend the poet Louise Bogan, Winters writes: “I could probably go into the merchant marine as a crew member, but I can hardly take a job voluntarily that will pay me too little to support my family . . . Meanwhile I sit around & watch the kids go. All I can do for civilization is try to counteract a little of the effect of Lewis Mumford & our new School of Humanities, which is a god-awful mess.” A month later, in a letter to the Los Altos postmaster,…