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)

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."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 1963

"Delicious recollections / float like perfume through the memory."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 1965

"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."

— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)

Date: 1968

"my mind a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations, / luminous soft threads, / the thrown glamour, crossing and recrossing, / the twisted sinews underlying the work."

— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)

Date: 1972

"Is this passing madness / standing neck deep / in mudflats / tidetables / pasted / to the brain?"

— Plumb, David

Date: 1981

"What's my head but a rat's nest / of dubious texts?"

— Harwood, Gwen (1920-1995)

Date: 1985

"If the soul is just the story that it tells, then / Did his answer, his smile, / The way he took his comb out of his back pocket / And slicked his hair back, / Spite the soul with something like the soul?"

— Levis, Larry Patrick (1946-1996)