Date: 1872

"At Shakespear's happy birth / With fire ethereal Jove his soul endow'd, / Then bade him spurn the narrow bounds of earth, / And sordid wishes of the grov'ling crowd, / That chain the free-born mind."

— Laurence, French (1757-1809)

Date: 1914

"A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1920

"The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all...

— Lukács, Georg (1885-1971)

Date: 1922

"In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1922

"Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears, / Transforming me into a shape of flame. / I will come out, back to your world of tears, / A stronger soul within a finer frame."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: w. 1936, 1938

"The year plunges into night / and the heart plunges / lower than night // to an empty, windswept place / without sun, stars or moon / but a peculiar light as of thought // that spins a dark fire-- / whirling upon itself until, / in the cold, it kindles // to make a man aware of nothing / that he...

— Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963)

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."

— Raphaelson, Samson (1894-1983)

Date: 1949

"And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

— Orwell, George (1903-1950)

Date: 1964

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

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