Date: 1946
"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."
preview | full record— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)
Date: 1953
"Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?"
preview | full record— Amis, Kingsley (1922-1995)
Date: December, 1954
"Does Somebody look bored, / His thoughts vacant as plaster, with being year / After bleeding year, our immobile word?"
preview | full record— Scott, Peter Dale (b. January 11, 1929)
Date: 1955
"The courtyards of the inner heart go round / And round, so sure are they / Where they will end; the brick / Convolutions enter and extend / The individual life, and come to end."
preview | full record— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)
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."
preview | full record— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)
Date: 1959
"The heart's tough shell is still to crack / When, spent of all its wine and bread, / Unwinkingly the altar lies / Wreathed in its sour breath, cold and dead, / A server has put out its eyes."
preview | full record— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)
Date: 1959, 1964
"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"
preview | full record— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)
Date: 1963
"Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake / heavy with useless experience, rich / with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, / crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge / of mere fact."
preview | full record— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)
Date: 1963
"Delicious recollections / float like perfume through the memory."
preview | full record— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)