Date: 1955, 1958

"It [the title of this book] is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them---as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It will be dark out there / with the Salvation Army Band. / And the mind its own illumination."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1959

"Look, the fixed stars, all just alike / as lack-land atoms split apart, / and the Republic summons Ike, / the mausoleum in her heart."

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

Date: 1959, 1964

"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"

— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)

Date: 1964

"Industrious, affable, having brain on fire, / Henry perplexed himself."

— Berryman, John [b. John Allyn Smith, Jr.] (1914-1972)

Date: 1965

"The younger machines occupy miles of dark benches, / Enjoying self-induced vacations of the mind, / Eating textbook rinds, spitting culture seeds, / Dreaming an exotic name to give their latest defeat, / Computing the hours on computer minds."

— Kaufman, Bob (1925-1986)

Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)

Date: 1968

"my mind a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations, / luminous soft threads, / the thrown glamour, crossing and recrossing, / the twisted sinews underlying the work."

— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)

Date: 1972

"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind."

— Seals, Jim (b. 1941) and Dash Crofts (b. 1940)

Date: 1985

"If the soul is just the story that it tells, then / Did his answer, his smile, / The way he took his comb out of his back pocket / And slicked his hair back, / Spite the soul with something like the soul?"

— Levis, Larry Patrick (1946-1996)