Yvor Winters

Here you will find the Poem The Moralists of poet Yvor Winters

The Moralists

You would extend the mind beyond the act, 
Furious, bending, suffering in thin 
And unpoetic dicta; you have been 
Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact. 
As metal singing hard, with firmness racked, 
You formulate our passion; and behind 
In some harsh moment nowise of the mind 
Lie the old meanings your advance has packed. 


No man can hold existence in the head. 
I, too, have known the anguish of the right 
Amid this net of mathematic dearth, 
And the brain throbbing like a ship at night: 
Have faced with old unmitigated dread 
The hard familiar wrinkles of the earth.