Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Walt Whitman | Maggie Reifert

Portrait of Walt Whitman (2012) © Maggie Reifert

Above A few weeks ago, in a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. One of the most interesting results was this image of American writer (poet, essayist, journalist) Walt Whitman (1819-1892), designed by Maggie Reifert.

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Algernon C. Swinburne—

…he [Whitman] is a writer of something occasionally like English, and a man of something occasionally like genius.

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John Jay Chapman—

In Whitman's works the elemental parts of a man's mind and the fragments of imperfect education may be seen merging together, floating and sinking in a sea of insensate egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, disgusting, extraordinary.