Date: 1940
"Well I really wouldn't care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I'd find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter... which doesn't work."
preview | full record— Raphaelson, Samson (1894-1983)
Date: 1941, 1942
"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."
preview | full record— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)
Date: 1942
"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."
preview | full record— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)
Date: December, 1942
"Do we act or do we think / when years roll round on a barber's pole, / when what is red is white is pink, / which is body which is soul?"
preview | full record— Smith, William Jay (1918-2015)
Date: 1946
"A ghost is someone: death has left a hole / For the lead-colored soul to beat the fire"
preview | full record— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)
Date: 1946
"John, Matthew, Luke and Mark, / Gospel me to the Garden, let me come / Where Mary twists the warlock with her flowers— / Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers / And her whole body an ecstatic womb, / As through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom."
preview | full record— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)
Date: 1946
"The State had reasons: on the whole, / It acted out of kindness when it locked / Its servants in this place and had him watched / Until an ordered darkness left his soul / A tabula rasa"
preview | full record— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)
Date: April 8, 1950
"Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack."
preview | full record— Salinger, J.D. (1919-2010)
Date: 1951
"And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind."
preview | full record— Bradbury, Ray (1920-2012)
Date: 1954
"The furniture of our minds consists of what we hear, read, observe, discuss and think each day."
preview | full record— Watson, Thomas J. (1874-1956)