William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love

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What to expect

Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker.

‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ Olivia Laing

‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant

‘A life-changing book’ Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times

‘Fabulously idiosyncratic’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

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 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’ Philip Marsden, Spectator

‘This love letter to William Blake couldn’t be more eccentric … Philip Hoare’s weird and wonderful style soars in this study of the poet and his disciples’ Ian Sansom, Telegraph

‘Hoare’s impassioned style, alive with metaphor and wordplay, has often been called “dreamlike”. This is apt, given his total immersion in his subject … Nothing will be as audacious or intriguing as William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love’ Jenny Uglow, Times Literary Supplement

Critics Review

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‘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

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‘A triumph, as strange, unclassifiable and awe-inspiring as the man at its beating heart’ Malcolm Forbes, Wall Street Journal

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‘A dazzlingly written and wildly eccentric mashup of biography, history and memoir … Hoare picks up the pieces and rearranges them in a dazzling new pattern, and the result is one of the most original and uncategorisable works I’ve read for a long time’ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

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‘An appropriately ecstatic, kaleidoscopic and intimately vast engagement with our great and practical visionary’ Geoff Dyer, New Statesman

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‘William Blake 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’ Literary Review

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‘Hoare's version of a Blake print, a meandering, undulating reverie … A book to dive into and get lost in; you might find a new world while you are at it’ Christoph Irmscher, Art Newspaper

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‘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

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‘A Blakean universe replete with fairies and spirits, butterflies and stars, sacred monsters and hermaphrodites … Endearingly intimate’ Kirkus Review

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'Everything exists at once: horror, stars, trees, art, love, and it's up to us to behold it all. Which is exactly what Philip Hoare does … He really sets out to behold it all’ Helena de Groot, Poetry Foundation

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