William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love

Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World

Philip Hoare

A revelatory and joyous exploration of how one visionary inspired two-hundred years of art, poetry and protest by the acclaimed author of Albert and the Whale

Weaving between the historical, cultural, and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired by the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake.

Blake is one of the greatest artists in western history. His art envelops us. He invented a way to put words and images on a page to express his poetry and art in a manner that has never been truly equaled. Even in his own time, his fans and followers were left speechless.

Blake's heavenly bodies are our real selves, soaring beyond time and space. His art is a time machine. We can climb aboard and be taken to the stars. Blake accepted no limits to the human spirit.

Throughout his life he worked as one-artist, two-people with his partner, Kate. Together they created their visions of what the world could be, filled with majestic menageries of tygers burning bright and angels in trees, of leviathans and demons and human fleas and a devil who burns with revolutionary ecstasy.

In William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, with Philip Hoare as our inimitable guide, Blake rises as a new hope for our own era.

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Endorsements & Reviews

“A dazzlingly written and wildly eccentric mashup of biography, history and memoir. One of the most original and uncategorisable works I’ve read for a long time. Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to describe it as a life-changing book as Hoare clears away our assumptions about Blake and makes us look at this brilliant, baffling genius in a completely new way. Get ready to see it on some important prize shortlists this year.” The Times (London)

“A poetic fever dream of a book. Blake, in Hoare’s telling, is not merely a poet or a painter but a kind of spectral force. Hoare [has a] unique and idiosyncratic voice: part scholar, part mystic, part Quentin Crisp-ish raconteur.” The Telegraph

"Philip Hoare brings the fizz of his own sensibility to bear on the work of a man whose progeny of artistic spin-offs multiply with each passing generation. The result is a book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all. He takes us on a joyful and dizzying romp through the stories of those who came under Blake’s posthumous spell. Each of Hoare’s subjects is affected with a certain wildness, a loosening of societal norms that makes for expressive beauty and eccentricity, giving the author a host of colourful and hyper-connected anecdotes. In doing so, they make him a part of the very tradition he is recording, his own work here reaching ecstatic heights, his prose filled with moments of sudden clarity, his life and passions glimpsed." The Spectator

"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, acclaimed author of The Garden Against Time

“Hoare captures the singular genius of poet, artist, and visionary William Blake in an exuberant romp through Blake’s life, times, and afterlife. An ardent admirer of Blake’s 'fantastical ideas,' Hoare praises him as 'the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds.' Endearingly intimate. An imaginative response to an enigmatic artist.” Kirkus Reviews

"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. Only Hoare could find the Johnny Cash in William Blake, or loop the line so gracefully to Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is his greatest masterpiece yet." Laura Cumming, art critic, The Observer

"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

Praise for Albert and the Whale:

"This idiosyncratic account of the life, work, and afterlife of the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer considers how art imagines our world. Hoare shows Dürer’s responsiveness to his times, and places his subject in a surprising lineage of artists including William Blake, Marianne Moore, Thomas Mann, and Andy Warhol. These comparisons elucidate Dürer’s radicalism, and establish him as a revolutionary and thoroughly modern artist. Hoare writes, 'Before Dürer, dragons existed; after him, they did not.'" The New Yorker

“You can feel the delight Hoare takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms. He is alternately precise and concealing. His biographical sections are both elliptical and redolent of entire lives. Somehow, Hoare’s frequent cuts between the present, the recent(ish) past and more distant history end up feeling like no cuts at all; instead of whiplash or disorientation, what results is an almost calm feeling of all these times existing simultaneously, in the moment of reading. Albert and the Whale will pull you in like the tide.” John Williams, The New York Times