Date: 1785

"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: w. 1788, 1810

"Thee, Bard morose, / Churlish amid thy fancy's golden stores, / Thee will I teach, censorious as thou art, / What is not Virtue."

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1794

"No--long they lived great nature to explore, / Their minds enriching with poetic store."

— Pointon, Priscilla [AKA Priscilla Pickering] (c. 1740-1801)

Date: 1799

"Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among / Fixes her turf-built seat; and wears the garb / Of deep philosophy, and museful sits, / In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind, / Soothed by the whispering shade; for soothing soft / The shades; and vistas lengthening into air, / With moonbeam rainbows ti...

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1892

"The broadest land that grows / Is not so ample as the breast / These emerald seams enclose."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 2006

"Curses, outbursts / and distracting chants simmer all day / long in the Crock-Pots of our heads."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: April 21, 2014

"The old gag about LPs being like gasoline / Puddles that go up and dizzy us / With their fumes, and of middle age / Rotating us out of Earth's orbit, stars like / A corrupted computer file / And the forgetful mind, a red-topped / Tupperware when we were young / Now without gravity or capacity li...

— Greenbaum, Jessica

Date: 2014

"If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw--your memory, vessel of your feelings."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)