Date: 1775
"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "
preview | full record— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)
Date: 1775
"How like a wanton lamb that careless play'd, / The shepherd and the fold forgotten quite, / My vagrant soul, in search of vain delight, / Many long years from her true Shepherd stray'd!"
preview | full record— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)
Date: 1782
"Pleasure, the rambling Bird! the painted Jay! / May snatch the richest seeds of Verse away; / Or Indolence, the worm that winds with art / Thro' the close texture of the cleanest heart, / May, if they haply have begun to shoot, / With partial mischief wound the sick'ning root; / Or Avarice, the ...
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: w. 1789, 1804
"While Vanity unveils her whiffling flags, / Her glittering trinkets, and her tawdry rags-- / Spreads spangled nets, and fills her philter'd bowl, / To fix each Sense, and fascinate the Soul-- / Her birdlime twigs contrived with such sly Art, / That while they tangle thoughts, they trap the heart...
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1965
"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."
preview | full record— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)
Date: 1981
"What's my head but a rat's nest / of dubious texts?"
preview | full record— Harwood, Gwen (1920-1995)
Date: 2009
"These are some of the things // you don't have to know because the melody / is like a small bird, maybe a yellow canary, / that wings its way into your mind / --no, into your heart-- / where there's a perch already // set up for it, a little trapeze / to swing back and forth on as it sings / and...
preview | full record— Raab, Lawrence (b. 1946)
Date: June 1, 2010
"Books live in the mind like honey inside a beehive.
preview | full record— McGrath, Campbell (b. 1962)
Date: March, 2014
"my good mother, // her mind a trail of crumbs / in a woods flocked with birds."
preview | full record— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)