T.S. Eliot didn’t much care for Shelley’s poetry. That may seem an odd fact with which to start a note about Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), but only if we forget how much Eliot’s critical imagination, carrying the prestige of English poetry’s most successful modernist, dominated the mid-20th century. Of the five great early Romantics, Eliot thought, Shelley lacked the power of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the intelligence of Byron, or the sensibility of Keats. And so, for a generation, study and appreciation of Shelley declined. One knows what Eliot meant. Shelley can be a blowhard, with the attention span of a caffeinated child. But in such poems as “The World’s Wanderers,” he transmits the ineffable feeling of gazing at the night sky and feeling the swift slipping away of experienced reality.

The World’s Wanderers
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

                        I
Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
            Will thy pinions close now?

                        II
Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey
Pilgrim of heaven’s homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
            Seekest thou repose now?

                        III
Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world’s rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
            On the tree or billow?

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.