Mothers maintain an important role in the literary consciousness. While some poets, like Edgar Allan Poe in “To My Mother,” write to or about the maternal figures they’ve encountered in their lives, others address the mother as an idea, a god or an angel, a representation of beginnings and the origins of life. Still others speak to the complex experience of motherhood, as Sylvia Plath does in her poem “Morning Song”: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.”
This Mother’s Day, browse our new selection of poems, essays, books, and more for and about mothers to find the words to share with the mother in your life.