William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love

(Hardback)

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Weaving between the historical, personal and cultural, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the 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 his hero, Paul Nash, who had photographed Dorsets ancient megaliths a generation before. Both artists had an overarching guiding star for whom the mysterious site was a utopian dream of a better world a visionary who had died long ago yet remained electrically alive to them.

In this alluring and strange poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the vast and enduring legacy of William Blake. Reaching out of the past and far into the future, Blakes work draws together the natural world and the metaphysical realms, launching his uproarious spirit into the lives of countless artists, filmmakers, poets, writers, musicians, eccentrics and rebels. That same spirit of protest and radicalism continues to inspire us today, with Blakes promise of absolute freedom and the possibility of positive change.

Reviews

Praise for Philip Hoare:

His writing [is] the animating magic that brings people of the past directly into our present and unleashes spectacular visions along the way Laura Cumming, Observer

Always original Always pushing from somewhere new Olivia Laing

Hoare writes with a beautiful and liquid assurance, luxuriantly at home in this half-modernist, half-conventional medium and capable of astonishingly realised visions of floating moments and sea encounters Adam Nicholson

He is poetic and precise TLS

Hoare has wonderful, almost child-like relish for colourful stories and incredible facts His passionate engagement will infect you The Times

Author Bio

Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wildes Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and Englands Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBCs Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.