Date: 1937

"Figure on her waxen mind / Images of life refin'd."

— Philips, Ambrose (1674-1749)

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: 1942

"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

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: 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, 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)