What Allen Ginsberg's Howl opens with — 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness'

What Rilke's Duino Elegies open with — 'Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels'

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels."

What Dickinson's dashes do — fracture syntax to capture the way thought actually moves

Dickinson's dashes fragment syntax, mirroring spontaneous thought flow

What Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire captures — angels watching over Berlin, longing to feel what humans feel

Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire explores angels' yearning for human experiences in post-WWII Berlin

What the Underground Man represents in Notes from Underground — consciousness as a disease, thought as paralysis

The Underground Man symbolizes the destructive nature of self-consciousness and the paralysis of thought

What Hokusai's Great Wave captures — the power of nature dwarfing human endeavor in a single woodcut

"The sublime force of nature overpowering humanity in 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa'."

What Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of all the senses' sought — a new poetic language through extremity

Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement' aimed to revolutionize poetry via sensory disruption