Date: 1919

"I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul."

— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)

Date: 1929

"And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them once."

— Yeats, W. B. (1865-1939)

Date: 1938

"Listen, kids who die-- / Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you / Except in our hearts / Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp / Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, / Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht / But the day will come-- / Your are sure yourselves that it is...

— Hughes, Langston (1902-1967))

Date: 1940

"The provinces of his body revolted, / The squares of his mind were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs, / The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers."

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

Date: 1946

"At their best, they erect a grammatical artifice in which mental balconies and watch towers, as well as bridges and recesses, decorate the main structure."

— Gerth, Hans H. (1908-1978) and C. Wright Mills (1916-1962)

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: 1947

"Thoughts talk to me within / My mind, that shuttered room."

— Sassoon, Siegfried (1886-1967)

Date: 1947, 1958

"Turned back upon himself, secure within some imaginary inner fortress, he is the plaything of every hallucination, every spontaneous or deliberate ideological illusion."

— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)

Date: 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951

"It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: 1949-1952, 1953

"Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable t...

— Bellow, Saul (1915-2005)