There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers;
this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her.
Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything
patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben
Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of
the woman who was "no churl" as

A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes,
And white hair blown back softly from a face
Etherially fierce, as might have looked
Cassandra in old age.
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force.
Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers.
[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_;
Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_;
J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_;
Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale,
_The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of
woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is
hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while
she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's
adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D.
Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might
almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage
indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as
making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A
Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.]