BY: Adrian Smith
When Allen Crawford sought to improvise a few drawings while keeping Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ in mind, he ended up creating a visceral and immediate visual representation of Whitman’s iconic poem.
The designer/illustrator comes from Philadelphia, where the great American poet spent the last few decades of his life. Because of his familiarity with the settings the author describes in the poem, his illustrations display a profound understand of both the ideas Whitman expresses in his poem and the places he captures.
“I try to treat the poem as almost a landscape,” Crawford explains, “in the sense that I’m exploring this unknown territory and I’m taking field notes from the mind of Whitman.” Check out Crawford’s illustrations alongside Walt Whitman’s iconic poem ‘Song of Myself’
