WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE SEA MONSTERS OF LOVE

The life and legacy of a wild man.

Hoare, the author of Albert and the Whale (2021), captures the singular genius of poet, artist, and visionary William Blake (1757-1827) 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.” Blake, Hoare exults, “gave voice to spirits waiting to be released from a tree or a cave. Fertile, sensual, tactile, tortured exalted bodies, unabashed by their disinclination to wear anything other than their own skin. They become entire continents, universes, micro-macrocosms, uttering outrageous messages in speech bubbles edited for the beginning or ending of time.” Hoare’s well-populated volume includes Blake’s devoted wife, Kate; his brother Robert; writers and artists who were inspired by him, from Mary Shelley to the pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley to Patti Smith. “The voice of modernity before it began,” Blake anticipated James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, surrealist artists—Paul Nash and Eileen Agar, for example—as well as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Albert Durer and Oscar Wilde, subjects of Hoare’s previous books, make appearances, as does riding master and circus inventor Philip Astley, the Blakes’ neighbor in South London, where Blake and Kate happily sat naked in their garden. To Blake, the advent of factories, railroads, and engines felt like an “industrial leviathan” of burgeoning mechanization. “What did all this mean for the soul?” he wondered. “Who asked questions about the wisdom of progress and its stealth?” Hoare foregrounds these concerns as he 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.