Date: 1900

"Then from this hour deep on my heart engraved / Be all my duty needful."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1912

"Who does not harbor in his breast / The fruitage of forbidden things / Culled from beauty's lips and heart, / And folded in between the leaves / Of memory's roll of reveries."

— Beadle, Samuel Alfred (1857-1932)

Date: 1946

"The State had reasons: on the whole, / It acted out of kindness when it locked / Its servants in this place and had him watched / Until an ordered darkness left his soul / A tabula rasa"

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

Date: 1990

"The soul too / is a debasement / of a text, but, thus, it / acquires salience, although a / human salience, but / inimitable, and, hence, memorable."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1996

"Each one of my thoughts was being ghostwritten / By anonymous authors."

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)