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

"A ghost is someone: death has left a hole / For the lead-colored soul to beat the fire"

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

Date: 1953

"Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?"

— 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?"

— 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."

— 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."

— 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."

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1959, 1964

"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"

— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)

Date: 1962

"Is there no way out of the mind?"

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)