Oscar Wilde's aesthetic manifesto is famous for its assertion that painters taught us to see sunsets and fog; but it is no less notable for its parting remark that poets gave us the language of twilight. The evening hour – no longer day and not yet night – has been the preeminent time of lyric utterance since the Romantic era, the period invoked when Wilde's alter ego Vivian quotes from Blake's sonnet “To the Evening Star.” An anthology of poems set at this threshold would include, to name only a few, Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, Shelley's “Adonais,” Whitman's “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Stevens' “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and Bishop's “At the Fishhouses.” If, as Wilde says, evening is useful primarily for illustrating the words of poets, it is remarkable that so many poets have found uses for this time of day, above all other times.