William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love

by Philip Hoare

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.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Biography, Poetry, Literature, Audiobook, History

464 pages, Hardcover

Published April 10, 2025

About the author

Philip Hoare is an English writer, especially of history and biography. He instigated the Moby Dick Big Read project. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton and Leverhulme artist-in-residence at the Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully queer, idiosyncratic exploration of the life, work and influence of visionary artist and poet William Blake. Philip Hoare shies away from cradle-to-grave biography or dry academic assessment, instead his approach is lyrical, poetic, richly associative, sometimes digressive, perhaps even a little self-indulgent. Moving restlessly back and forth in time and space, Hoare traces connections between Blake and a veritable cavalcade of literary, artistic and activist figures including: Derek Jarman; artist Paul Nash; Nancy Cunard; Mary Butts; T. E. Lawrence; Denton Welch; Oscar Wilde; James Joyce; medium Hester Dowden; and Algernon Blackwood. There’s a fascinating account of the life of W. Graham Robertson, once set designer for Oscar Wilde, whose chance encounter with Blake’s work was to rescue it from falling into obscurity; an intriguing meditation on the links between Blake’s poetry, his fascination with the natural world, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. All tangled up with fragments of Hoare’s own memories, glimpses of his emotional states, his astonishment at the power of Blake’s images and imagery. There are passages that possess a kind of hypnotic, deranged beauty; the intimate and reflective jostling with the more routinely descriptive. It’s hard to know exactly how to convey the feel of Hoare’s book, as a writer he’s been dubbed Derek Jarman’s literary heir, not unreasonably. But there are hints here too of Robert Macfarlane, even a touch of Sebald, although far, far wilder. I can see this won’t be for everyone but I really loved it. Just glorious.

Thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Fourth Estate

[Jen Burrows · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kaleidoscopic, dream-like foray into the art and poetry of William Blake, and a whole raft of artists who have taken inspiration from him over the years. Hoare's prose is as fluid and dense and changeable as the sea he uses as his central motif: it's compelling but I did wish he'd give me a chance to come up for air every now and then. Highly literary and rich in research, with a few too many meandering digressions, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is a unique and bewitching read.

*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't really begin to describe this book. If anything it's more like an account of a man being haunted by William Blake and an exploration of other men who have been similarly afflicted. It has no real linear movement, no timeline and no adherence to anything much earthly except that the words are trapped inside the pages of a book. I have no problem with this. I think on balance that this is exactly the type of book Blake would approve of, although I am somewhat derailed by the idea of what he might have unleashed on the world via the power of TikTok were he alive today. I very much enjoyed the interludes spent in the company of Derek Jarman, Paul Nash and Gerard Manley Hopkins to name but a few of the fellow Blake devotees.

I feel rather washed up on the shore after a storm at sea having finally finished this book. I think it will stay with me in one aspect or another for a very long time.

[Liam Ostermann]

Read the following from The Guardian ans see if you can resist this book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a marathon read. About William Blake and the many people influenced by his visions which most of his works actually were. It seemed his day to day existence was like living in a drug induced nightmare or sometimes maybe euphoria. Perhaps both simultaneously. I can’t say I got to understand much more about Blake and his art or writings but I persevered through somewhat over-blown prose, (I think the author is quite opaque and carried away with his own verbosity sometimes) as many other famous and not so famous people were referenced and we get to learn something about them not generally known.

People like Paul Nash and James Joyce. I learnt the names of women not so well known but just as influential in their time. Nash’s wife Margaret Odeh. There’s a surrealist painter Eileen Agar whose paintings are imo, quite brilliant. I looked her up. There’s Nancy Cunard, activist feminist, who all her remarkable life fought racism and sexism and was muse to some of the most famous men, artists and writers, and also lover of quite a few! And not least Catherine Blake hugely influential in all spheres of Blake’s life, engravings and paintings. The detail was brilliant and worth what I found at times to be like wading through treacle.

A big complaint I have with this book is it lacked an index. So many names are mentioned, if the reader wanted to go back and check someone or a detail, it was quite difficult to find the detail you were looking for. Also, the black and white pictures were pretty difficult to see clearly if at all. There is however, a good selection of Blake’s more famous paintings.

For all my criticisms I recommend this book, to be read at leisure, a few pages at a time probably!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

What to say about this book. I think it’s the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing art through someone else’s eyes and emotions. Hoare grabs you at the start, and he doesn’t let you go. It’s like being pulled into the sea, and then underneath the waves. It makes no sense and perfect sense.
I am not sure I could follow every idea and every thought, even though many of them seem to appear over and over again. As though he’s trying to reach for a way to understand and explain. But it’s a marvellous book. I’m entirely unsure what to read next as whatever I read next will feel flat in comparison. I feel a bit… ravaged.

[Tilly ~ was successfully manipulated by a wizard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic and strange; the first half is about the Blakes, William and Catherine, through the context of the handful of places they lived, and references to sea beasts in Blake's works, because Hoare is obsessed with the ocean and with Melville in particular.

The second half is about TE Lawrence, James Joyce, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Iris Murdoch et al. Short biographies of people who were influenced by Blake in some significant way.

Kate gets a lot of time on the page because Hoare correctly identifies that William lived in accordance with his art, Kate was the feminine element that was essential to his alchemical process.

They left very little behind other than their art, so much of the biographical detail is expanded and coloured by Hoare's imagination, but a huge amount of Blake's poetry and art was based on his own imaginary versions of historical figures, so I think it's fine.

In his introduction Hoare basically says he wrote this after he lost an argument because he didn't know anything about Blake, and he thought he should learn.

He certainly did learn, it's obvious that researching and writing this was a life-changing intellectual and spiritual experience for him; he is fully Blake-pilled. His excitement leaps off the page.

I love that he's not afraid to get a bit weird with it, he buys into the visions of ghosts and spirits, and some of the sex cult stories, and (most importantly, to me) he's not afraid to come out and say plainly that some of Blake's lines were The Best Ever Written. (Yes, better than Shakespeare).

Actually come to think of it, the one bit of weird Blake esoterica that didn't get mentioned was that he was the Chief of the Primrose Hill druids

oh well

I thought I was going to come out of this with a huge reading list, but that didn't really happen because Hoare decided to do a deep dive into a handful of famous authors, rather than a broad survey, but that's ok

[ANTHONY CUTLER · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book holds out sea monsters in its title. It then starts off with an account of the author swimming in the ocean. I could not help immediately think about the Iris Murdoch novel The Sea, the Sea. That novel tells of a superannuated thespian who retires to the coast and swims in the sea. There he has an hallucination of sea monsters, a "flashback" to some juvenile experiment with psychedelic drugs.

I had, at first, thought that to be some adventitious association never anticipated by the author. But. In the first of any number of discursive side accounts, Hoare tells of his youthful dalliance with the early 1980s southern England counterculture. Historically, the prominent figure in that fringe was Derek Jarman. Hoare tells us about some rather juvenile seaside enactment of a scene from William Blake (at last) with Jarman as demiurge. Again, slightly predictably, the ensemble end up back at the mansion of the obligatory minor aristocrat, the cadet of whom was adding the necessary establishment gloss to their artistic pretensions. And who should be one of the house guests? Murdoch herself. I turns out the ocean swimming/ sea monster motif had been intended. It's explained for anybody who hasn't got it so far.

I just note at this point that I find his celebration of the early 1980s southern England artistic fringe, as some sort of heroic (but failed) protest against "Thatcherism", slightly boorish. Artistically, not without its merits. But that's as far as it goes. Jarman was authentic and interesting. The garden; Dungeness. I've been.

But, at the end of the day, this is supposed to be a book about Blake. We get some selective biographical details, which I valued, mainly focussing on his stay in Bognor Regis. There is much here about the neglect and subsequent rediscovery of Blake's work. An interesting and worthwhile story to tell. Blake was wholly disregarded during his lifetime save for civil servant/ coal merchant Thomas Butts. William Graham Robertson then discovered Butts' discarded property in a thrift store. Robertson, we are told, was the first to "wear the green carnation", and was painted by John Singer Sargent (in a studio at the end of Tite Street, Chelsea, where Oscar Wilde lived). Robertson then went on to champion Blake's work and bring it to national attention.

Painter John Nash R.A. was invalided out of the Artists' Rifles at the start of the First World War. Before going on to become the eminent war artist of the later part of the conflict, Nash saw Blake's works in an exhibition in Piccadilly and was inspired.

None of this is told as a linear biography. The telling is anecdotal and thematic, rather than linear narrative. And it's interspersed with any number of other digressions into those touched by Blake's works, the relevance of which I didn't always follow. John Milton of course; A E Houseman, Herman Melville, Dh Lawrence, Francis Bacon. But Nancy Cunard? Another tiresome bohemian.

Then there was Jacob Bronowski. Bronowski, minor mathematician, worked in operational research during World War II (despite being recorded as a security risk by British intelligence), then some celebrity as a guest on the more cerebral end of British TV in the post-war years. Bronowski's 1970s BBC TV documentary series The Ascent of Man was probably the biggest single cultural influence of my life. His exploitation of art, poetry and a vast intellectual canvas in order to tell the story of science, as I watched in my High School years, settled that I wanted it all. Bronowksi's Penguin paperback selection of Blake's verse was one of the first poetry books I bought for myself.

And nobody is writing a book about Blake in the twenty first century without discussing Northrop Frye's heavyweight 1947 analysis Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. We get that.

All this is really quite wonderful but ... . The book is entirely lacking in structure. All this is tossed together and we are left to make of it what we will. The whole smacks of self indulgence. I might say such is typical of that whole 1980s boho scene. Disregard for the reader has knocked this down to three stars. The books lacks citations, a bibliography or even an index. I put this down to a signal failure by the editor. I then look at the acknowledgments, we get those, and find Hoare had an editor, with a named assistant, a co-ordinator, a producer, a copy editor and a proof reader. Just goes to show.

[Léonie Galaxie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Hoare has created something truly special with this inspired examination of William Blake—a book that captures both the revolutionary spirit of the visionary artist and his profound impact on centuries of creative minds. Rather than offering a conventional biography, Hoare takes a far more imaginative approach, weaving together Blake's extraordinary life with a fascinating exploration of how his "fantastical ideas" continue to inspire artists, writers, and thinkers today.

What makes this book so compelling is Hoare's deep appreciation for Blake's unique genius in fusing word and image in masterworks like "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." The author skillfully places Blake within the tumultuous context of the French, American, and industrial revolutions, showing how this remarkable figure navigated an era of unprecedented change while creating art that feels timelessly relevant.

The book's greatest strength lies in its celebration of Blake's far-reaching influence, tracing connections to an impressive array of creative figures from Derek Jarman and Iris Murdoch to James Joyce and the pre-Raphaelites. Hoare demonstrates how Blake's visionary approach continues to resonate across different art forms and generations, making a compelling case for his enduring relevance.

Perhaps most movingly, Hoare brings his own sense of wonder to the project, sharing his personal quest to encounter Blake's surviving works and even describing the experience of looking through the artist's own spectacles. This intimate approach transforms what could have been a dry academic study into a passionate love letter to artistic vision and its power to transcend time. The result is a book that honors both Blake's genius and the continuing magic of creative inspiration.

[Haxxunne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A vast family tree of associations
—
Hoare’s organic, mesmerising book will not be to the taste of many. It’s not a biography of Blake, nor even of his contemporaries, and certainly not of those artists and writers influenced by Blake, all the way to the author himself by way of TE Lawrence, Paul Nash and Derek Jarman. It’s not a precursor to the Pre-Raphaelites, or to William Morris. It’s not a book about the monsters of Blake’s imagination and perhaps his experience.

Or rather, it’s not simply any one of these things while being all of them, as well as partly Hoare’s memoir of Blake’s influence on him and his own life, an exploration of the reality and fantasy of monsters (particularly from the sea), on religion and patriotism, on love and friendship, on art history and art appreciation: there are many books in this dense commonplace book, and this will frustrate some readers as it will delight others.

Infuenced by Joyce’s stream of consciousness (and he makes a long cameo too), it’s possible to dip into the book and dip out again, or to read it through in one go; but I would say that it bears re-reading for specific nuggets from particular players, for confirmation of a quote or a phrase (speech isn’t indicated at all, and the first person pronoun can be confusing from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph), or for a colourful detail or revelation. Structured as a book but really it is more like a vast family tree of associations, coincidences and actions, that layer together into a palimpsest that describes William Blake in one way, whilst still allowing other ways to proliferate and bloom in the reader.

Four and a half stars

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Blake's was a priestly mission, a vocation, and he would never leave it till his work was done."

A kaleidoscopic, stream-of-consciousness exploration of William Blake and his influence across literature and queer culture, Hoare's book echoes recent nonfiction releases like Question 7 and Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land in its sweeping and stylish writing about vast historical eras. His journeys from the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins to the films of David Bowie and Nicolas Roeg are yoked together by Hoare's punchy prose, displayed particularly effectively in his ekphrastic descriptions of Blake's works, and his attention to presenting concrete details such as how Blake and his wife collaborated in print-making.

This book doesn't feel like it has the perfect narrative control that made QUESTION 7 so striking, with its leaps and tangents sometimes feeling perplexing rather than intuitively cohesive, and it's certainly a bulky text to get through. But as an admirer of Blake and many of the writers he influenced, Hoare's book allows the qualities that make Blake's art so magnetic to shine through: his curiosity, his radicalism, his relentless and dazzling genius.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a weird and wonderful book. I learned a lot about William Blake, the painter, poet and print maker. I also learned a lot about the author and many other people ~ Gerald Manley Hopkins, Derek Jarman, Patti Smith. I knew Patti Smith was a fan of Blake as I have the collection edited by her but I hadn’t realised Robert Mapplethorpe did what he did ~ no spoilers ~ but what a stupid action. Well, actually two stupid actions. Also amazing to think William Robertson saved Blake’s work when it had no intrinsic value at the time. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the astonishing fever dream works we have.

Bowie was a fan, David Hockney, Gilbert and George. Blake lived and died penniless. Living in one room with his wife and his art. Like many geniuses who weren’t recognised in their lifetimes, his work is now esteemed and sought after. A shame that it couldn’t be understood in its time when Blake would’ve then had the leisure and materials to create more.

It’s a bit like Salvador Dali. The man who created those crazy surrealist dripping clocks also created a stunning image of Christ of St John of the Cross. Blake created a huge naked Newton, a ghost of a flea… but also wrote Jerusalem, an anthem for all England. Creatives are fascinating and this book gives a glimpse into several, while never forgetting the man at the centre.

I love Blake’s work and I’ll revisit it but I’ll also be revisiting a few other people after reading this book. It’s a triumph.

I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An imaginative, somewhat idiosyncratic and richly layered examination of William Blake’s life, art, poetry and lasting influence, especially the impact he has had on writers, artists and thinkers down the ages to this day. Hoare offers the reader a deep and sometimes challenging exploration of the man and his work, a comprehensive evaluation which I found deeply interesting and thought-provoking. From Mary Shelley to Derek Jarman, from Paul Nash to Nancy Cunard, Blake’s reach has been considerable, and although I found Hoare’s digressive style required patience and concentration, and it’s certainly not a book that can be rushed, it’s one I found deeply rewarding, engaging and illuminating.

[Simon Pitfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable piece of work, weaving connections between a whole host of my favourite writers and artists - Blake, Melville, Joyce, Bowie and Jarman to name but a few. Philip Hoare's enthusiasm for these and others traces the threads of an artistic lineage that permeates English and Irish culture, and then, like Ariadne, leaves trails to more that deserve to be followed up, such as Paul Nash and Nancy Cunard. Creativity, as evoked by Hoare's heightened, allusive prose, is a breath-taking powerful sea, populated by sirens demanding the total immersion of the reader/spectator, who must surrender themselves to the dark currents and the risk of drowning

An index would have been helpful though, for tracking the references that recur across different chapters.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Nantucket sleighride through the author's mind, often in the company of William Blake, but also Derek Jarman, Francis Bacon, Paul Nash, the members of the Golden Dawn, David Bowie, T.E. Lawrence, Wilde, Nancy Cunard and many other renowned rebels. Blake and the great whales though are never far away, one the artisan and descriptor of the mystical divine, the other the embodiment of it. The writing is witty, engaging, insightful, and wild, stream of consciousness that conflates centuries into simultaneity. All of Hoare's books are good, but this one is a vision.

[Julie Bender · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read anything like this book. The style and form are completely unique. For that alone it deserves five stars, but this was so clearly a labor of love and wonder and awe by Philip Hoare. It left me breathless. Just stunning and strange and rewarding in all the best ways possible.

[Seze Devres · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this but it was so disorganized. The writing is beautiful but there is no real structure, and there isn’t enough actual information on William
Blake.