William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare

Publishes 10 April 2025
 
How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry, and protest… Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake.
 
In 1973, Derek Jarman set off from London to film the stones of Avebury. He was following in the footsteps of Paul Nash, who had photographed the ancient megaliths a generation before. Standing in that muddy field, by those stones, both artists had felt a direct connection to their hero – a man who had died a long, long time ago, yet who remained electrically alive to them.
 
In this alluring and poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the enduring legacy of William Blake and how he came to inspire so many creative lives. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. This stirring, deeply-felt book brings us back to Blake and shows that art still has the power to create positive change.
 
-----
 
‘This wild, dreaming leviathan of a book is undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece. Who but the leading visionary of English letters could take on Blake, and find in him such riches? It is a mesmerising tapestry, intricate, strange and very queer, that ranges through time and space to create both a loving, wonderstruck portrait of the artist and a map of the universe of enchantment, terror and revolt that he opened for us all’ - OLIVIA LAING, AUTHOR OF THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME
 
‘Queer in all senses of the word’ - NEIL TENNANT, PET SHOP BOYS
 
‘An impassioned magnum opus celebrating Blake's star-shaken genius by discovering his lineage everywhere in the author’s own crystal cabinet of artists and outlaws. A tremendous literary performance’ - IAIN SINCLAIR, AUTHOR OF THE LAST LONDON
 
‘Wild, free, exhilaratingly beautiful, and so alive to the past that everyone and everything seems to be happening right now on the page. I cannot think of a more original writer at work today. For Hoare, all art flows through life like the air we breathe, like thought, or the beat of the heart: the two are never separate. His mind moves from one person or place to another, with barely a change of tense.’ - LAURA CUMMING AUTHOR OF THUNDERCLAP