British Victorians and their American counterparts were given to sentimental verse for excellent reasons. They wrote emotional poems about the loss of infants and children because deaths from childbearing and disease were all too common. They wrote poems of battle that were odes to heroism and sacrifice; these romantic notions of combat were soon to be snuffed out in the trenches of World War I and the deadly conflicts and genocides that marked the early years of the last century. They lauded the virtues of hearth and home because on both sides of the Atlantic a rising middle class found refuge from the world in the comforts and pleasures of domestic life.
And then there were the tributes that poets paid to motherhood.
