Critics may argue about whether the greatest American novel is
Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby or The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn. Harold Bloom doesn’t equivocate about the best poem. The
“essential American poem” is Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham
Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” he argues
in his new The Anatomy of Influence. “‘Lilacs’ seems to me the
greatest American poem because its largeness of vision is
inevitably expressed by a metric of which the poet had become a
master,” writes Bloom, perhaps America’s most distinguished
academic critic. “There is a biblical reverberation to Whitman’s
elegy, and not only because the hermit thrush’s song of death
echoes the erotic intensity of the Song of Songs.” Bloom adds:
“With splendid tact, Whitman avoids praising Lincoln’s victory
over his own countrymen, and creates an elegy of 206 lines
worthy of comparison with Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Shelley’s
‘Adonais.’”