Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1931

“Yes, let them all slip back once again into that closed world where, like their excreta, only what is organically and sensuously demonstrable is valid, let them feed off the routine detritus and mental excrement of what they call reality, for my part I will continue to regard The Monk a...

— Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: 1942

"It has to be on that stage / And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and / With meditation, speak words that in the ear, / In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, / Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound / Of which, an invisible audience listens, / Not to the play, but to itself, ex...

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: September, 1956

Je veux saisir les choses avec l'esprit comme le pénis est saisi par le vagin. [I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina.]

— Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968)

Date: 1959

Tolstoy has a "mind intoxicated with reason and fact."

— Steiner, George (b. 1929)

Date: 1959

"O quiet deed! / This is the breaking of the bread; / On this the leanest heart may feed / When by the stiffly-linened priest / All wounds of light are newly dressed, / Healed by the pouring-in of wine / From bitter — as from sweet — grapes bled."

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1959

"And so my heart has ceased to breathe / (Though there God's worm blunted its head / And stayed.)"

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1962

"Sandy screwed her eyes even smaller in the effort of seeing with her mind."

— Spark, Muriel (1918-2006)

Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)