Date: 1963

"What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963

"I stored the fact that there were real glasses in the corner of my mind the way a squirrel stores a nut."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963

"I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1981

"What's my head but a rat's nest / of dubious texts?"

— Harwood, Gwen (1920-1995)

Date: 1986

"But it was only the heart's / racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want // until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke / of my body by the last margin of land where the river // mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens, / a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as // bar...

— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)

Date: 1995

Emily Brontë's soul "goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, / out of sight."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1999

"A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 1999

"Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 2003

"How to hold it all at once, / except by passion's climb, / its rising tides & breathless, / hawk's-eye view?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

Date: December 2009

"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."

— Essbaum, Jill Alexander