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: 1946

"John, Matthew, Luke and Mark, / Gospel me to the Garden, let me come / Where Mary twists the warlock with her flowers— / Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers / And her whole body an ecstatic womb, / As through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom."

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

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: 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: 1955, 1958

"It will be dark out there / with the Salvation Army Band. / And the mind its own illumination."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1959

"Look, the fixed stars, all just alike / as lack-land atoms split apart, / and the Republic summons Ike, / the mausoleum in her heart."

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

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: 1964

"Industrious, affable, having brain on fire, / Henry perplexed himself."

— Berryman, John [b. John Allyn Smith, Jr.] (1914-1972)

Date: 1965

"The younger machines occupy miles of dark benches, / Enjoying self-induced vacations of the mind, / Eating textbook rinds, spitting culture seeds, / Dreaming an exotic name to give their latest defeat, / Computing the hours on computer minds."

— Kaufman, Bob (1925-1986)

Date: August, 1965

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

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)