Date: 1718

"My simple System shall suppose, / That Alma enters at the Toes; / That then She mounts by just Degrees / Up to the Ancles, Legs, and Knees: / Next, as the Sap of Life does rise, / She lends her Vigor to the Thighs: / And, all these under-Regions past,/ She nestles somewhere near the Waste."

— Prior, Matthew (1664-1721)

Date: 1850

"Caverns there were within my mind which sun / Could never penetrate, yet did there not / Want store of leafy arbours where the light / Might enter in at will."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Imagination--here the Power so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech, / That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, / At once, some lonely traveller"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, / The stationary blasts of waterfalls, / And in the narrow rent at every turn / Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, / The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, / The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, / Black...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"And, as the horizon of my mind enlarged, / Again I took the intellectual eye / For my instructor, studious more to see / Great truths, than touch and handle little ones."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: w. c. 1864, published 1929

"Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By -- Paradox -- the Mind itself -- / Presuming it to lead."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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)