Motherhood: Poems about Mothers

Every poet is a mother's child, and many of our greatest poets have immortalized this elemental relationship. Here are poets as diverse as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker and Seamus Heaney. From Christina Rossetti's "To My First Love, My Mother" and Emily Bronte's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" to Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the range of form and feeling is as varied as the experience itself. A literary potpourri that is the perfect gift for the first love in every reader's life.