Date: December 1847
"These were days when my heart was volcanic / As the scoriac rivers that roll-- / As the lavas that restlessly roll / Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek / In the ultimate climes of the pole."
preview | full record— Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)
Date: 1865
"Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul, / With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, / There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim."
preview | full record— Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)
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."
preview | full record— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)
Date: 1922
"The joy in your maturity at length, / The peace that filled my soul like cooling wine, / When you responded to my tender strength, / And pressed your heart exulting into mine."
preview | full record— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)
Date: 1922
"How shall I with such memories of you / In coarser forms of love fruition find? / No, I would rather like a ghost pursue / The fairy phantoms of my lonely mind."
preview | full record— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)
Date: 1942
"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."
preview | full record— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)
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."
preview | full record— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)
Date: 1959, 1964
"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"
preview | full record— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)
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."
preview | full record— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)
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?"
preview | full record— Levis, Larry Patrick (1946-1996)