This is a 21st-century version of an illuminated manuscript: as portable as a Kindle, but a thousand times more lovely. But what it lacks in legibility it makes up for in beauty. This version of Song of Myself is just occasionally tricky to follow, Crawford having “liberated” its lines from their blocks of verse so that they flow freely over the page “like a stream or a bustling city crowd”. The book took illustrator Allen Crawford 2,560 hours to complete. His hands became so sore, he would go to bed with them slathered in cream and covered with a sock “like an ageing baseball player”. During the winter, he slaved away in his Pennsylvania basement encased in several dressing gowns, boots and a Russian fur hat. Each two-page spread took him between eight and 10 hours to complete the whole thing consumed 2,560 hours of his life.

And what labour it was! In a brief foreword, Crawford describes the process involved in his book’s creation. He knows that it’s pretty “presumptuous” of him to have to attached his own name to Whitman’s, but he hopes to have atoned for this with his labour.

In turn, Allen Crawford, the American artist who has taken it upon himself to illustrate Whitman’s 60-page poem, protracting it along the way into 234 elaborately designed pages, hopes that we will find a little of the poet “under his pen”. Photograph: PublisherĪt the end of Song of Myself, the epic poem at the heart of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman invites us, his readers, to look for him beneath the soles of our boots. Almost twoo good: A page from Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself, illustrated by Allen Crawford.

Song of myself from leaves of grass