He has been called America's national poet, and his work is known for its egalitarian voice, and is simultaneously spiritual, democratic, patriotic, full of love, life, the horror of war, and the beauty of nature. His participation as a civil servant during America's Civil War is profoundly important in his work.
In Under the One Granite Roof, Karen Knight creates a composite portrait of the man during his civil war years, which, like Whitman's own work, operates on a number of levels. There is, first and perhaps foremost, the fifty individual poems that make up this collection. The poems are self-contained enough for some of them to have been published individually, and can be read alone, and without reference to the collection, or even to Whitman. Knight takes on topics such as the nature of war, the way in which art and life interact, physical attraction, the iconisation of history, the animal reality of what it means to be a human being, and above all, the simultaneous beauty, horror and permanent reality of patriotic death:
In a field at Gettysburg
the sun played tricks
on scattered tin cups
turning them
into silver christening goblets
or coming-of-age mementos
just beyond reach
of bloated men
stripped of valuable shoes. ("For Matthew Brady", 31)
Not all of the poems pivot around Whitman. We go inside the plush parlours of waiting females: "When Mrs Sawyer/no relation to Tom/heard When this Cruel War is Over/she wondered if it would ever/be sung by men." ("How the War Felt From the Piano Stool" 35), or "Twelve Civil War heroes/featured in a larger-than-life/sepia-toned calender/hung on bedroom walls/encouraging women/to marry again - " ("Army Surplus Calendar - 1865", 40).
Others take readers to the scene of hospital crimes, such as the utter devastation caused by hacksaw surgeons: "Dr Willard Bliss/Chief of Staff/stuck his unwashed finger/into the Captain's musket wound./What a fatal thing to do." ("At Armory Square Hospital", 16). Even without Whitman's sensitive lens, the reader is privy to the ugliness and black beauty of the battlefield with its hungry, doomed teenagers. There is sympathy and irony in equal measure - wry humour and black pathos:
Tourists admire
the heart-shaped leaves
on that tree
before heading into town
to buy Civil War bullets
at seventy cents each. ("Whitman Country" 44)
The poems also work as a single collective whole, creating a unique portrait of the great poet, but not as icon or genius, but rather as a sensual, sensitive, flawed man, still youthful and attractive himself, struggling to come to grips with the war he immerses himself in. The reader feels Whitman's physical beauty as he gives dying soldiers a long motherly kiss on the lips, or desperately tries to take down the names, describe the faces, and write the home addresses of every man in the hospital. This is a man admired, not for his great works, but for his humanity. The great irony of the 21st century is the common American's equation with a box of Whitman Samplers chocolates in "In the Heart of the Walt Whitman Mall" (46), or an admirer who writes to say that Whitman brings out his lower nature.
This aspect of the work functions almost as fiction, with this new Whitman as the key character. Knight creates a very intimate portrait, which manages to view both the public sector-paintings and self and the real man, suffering difficult brothers, or carrying a dying father up narrow stairs. He is vain enough to write his own reviews comparing himself to Homer and Shakespeare ("His Own Best Critic", 48), concrete enough to sit under a tree conjuring the past, physical enough for his ghost to hope for rain on the day of his funeral (For the Sunday Papers, 62) and his poems concrete enough to revive the man in the right place and circumstance:
But when his poems are taken into hospitals
they ease themselves through the sliding doors
dressed in immaculate white shirts
open at the neck
and soft grey felt sombreros
that tilt all the way back. ("All Over America", 68)
This is a fictional but masterful portrait of Whitman, and a specific but critical segment of his life. Knight's imagery is sharp and powerful -laugh outloud funny at times, brief and pointed or ironic and subtle at others. Under the One Granite Roof presents a Whitman whose life, death, and subsequent afterlife as "poetic genius" (and icon) work together - a composite and moving rendition which goes beyond biography, beyond tribute, and through history to produce a new creation altogether.
(Reviewed by Magdalena Ball, September 2004)
