Date: 1946

"A ghost is someone: death has left a hole / For the lead-colored soul to beat the fire"

— 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."

— 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"

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

Date: 1953

"Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?"

— Amis, Kingsley (1922-1995)

Date: December, 1954

"My mind, a vagrant, dreams on the shining Alps."

— Scott, Peter Dale (b. January 11, 1929)

Date: December, 1954

"Does Somebody look bored, / His thoughts vacant as plaster, with being year / After bleeding year, our immobile word?"

— Scott, Peter Dale (b. January 11, 1929)

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

"And I believe in the spurred flame, / Those racing tongues, but cannot come / Out of my heart's unbroken room."

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)