Rivaled only by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 “The Scarlet Letter,” the 1851 “Moby-Dick” stands as the great novel of the pre-Civil-War era, an early masterpiece in a still-nascent American literature. In its time, however — and despite the success of such earlier novels as “Typee” — the ambitious “Moby-Dick” found only a tepid critical reception.

The disappointment set the tone for the remainder of the 1850s and shaped Melville’s later career as a writer of fiction. In the 1860s, discouraged and with a family to support, he went to work as a federal customs inspector and turned his literary energies to poetry. 

That poetry went unappreciated in Melville’s lifetime. It wasn’t until 1971 that a critical edition of his poems appeared, selected by Robert Penn Warren. As is evident in today’s Poem of the Day, “The Maldive Shark,” his poetic sensibilities are more at home in the Modernist context than in the era of the 19th-century Fireside Poets.