Date: 1942

"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."

— 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?"

— Smith, William Jay (1918-2015)

Date: 1944; 2018

"My desk is the monument to my mind, and by the appearance of it, my mind must have intimate contact with garbage collectors."

— O'Connor, Flannery (1925-1964)

Date: 1944; 2018

"It is pleasanter to be five years older and beautiful than status quo and under par, but I must force my loose mind into its overalls and get going."

— O'Connor, Flannery (1925-1964)

Date: 1945

"The mob within the heart / Police cannot suppress / The riot given at the first / Is authorized as peace."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1946

"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1946

"his brain appears, throned in "fantastic triumph," / and shines through his hat / with jeweled works at work at intermeshing crowns, / lamé with lights."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1946

"Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie / his rushing brain."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

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)