William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
Format:Hardback
Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers
Published:10th Apr '25
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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.
‘A life-changing book’ The Times, Book of the Week
‘A poetic fever dream’Telegraph
‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ Olivia Laing
‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant
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 twentieth-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.
‘A book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all … a joyful and dizzying romp through the stories of those who came under Blake’s posthumous spell’ Spectator
‘Prepare to be confused, dazzled and amazed: it’s a poetic fever dream of a book … It’s not just a book about Blake: it’s a Blakean book’ Telegraph
‘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’ Spectator
‘This wild, dreaming leviathan of a book is undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece … It is a mesmerising tapestry, intricate, strange and very queer, that ranges through time and space’ Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time
‘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 … To look at English art through his eyes is to see more than you ever could before’ Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap
‘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
‘William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is obviously, and winningly, animated by the overpowering excitement that the author feels when he encounters the works of William Blake … Hoare’s passion for Blake is a marvellous thing, as is his admiration for Nash’ Literary Review
‘An exuberant romp … [Hoare] examines a Blakean universe replete with fairies and spirits, butterflies and stars, sacred monsters and hermaphrodites. Sometimes maddeningly digressive, Hoare’s history is, nonetheless, endearingly intimate. Abundantly illustrated. An imaginative response to an enigmatic artist’ Kirkus Review
ISBN: 9780008534349
Dimensions: 222mm x 141mm x 44mm
Weight: 700g
464 pages