Date: 1848

"Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody! / Attuning still the soul to tenderness"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1865

"Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul, / With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, / There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim."

— Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)

Date: 1892

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1936

"The way / to certainty is charted now, / the sensitive ears alive to sound, / antennae poised for touch, and in the head / all tissue quivering like violin strings."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)

Date: December 2009

"To keep your cell the way you keep your soul, / Untidy-minded, neither soiled nor sold / For next to nothing, a treasury of old / Notions like the notes of a piano-roll / Which cannot improvise though it knows a whole / Repertoire, what ought one to withhold?"

— Hine, Daryl (b. 1936)

Date: 2010

"A thought to mind, so to the string / plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, / a wrinkling of the air as immaterial / and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: April 4, 2011

"For in mind should be voidy wings choiring, not selves."

— Williams, C. K. (b. 1936)