This love letter to William Blake couldn't be more eccentric

Telegraph

04-04-2025

Philip Hoare's new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, is ostensibly about the life and work of the visionary poet and his influence on a whole host of writers, artists and filmmakers. But it's far from a conventional study. If you've never read Hoare before, prepare to be confused, dazzled and amazed: it's a poetic fever dream of a book, which often reads like a kaleidoscopic convergence of the themes he's explored in his earlier books, Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) and Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World (2021), all of which tend to defy easy classification (except, perhaps, the remit of 'sea monsters'). Besides Blake, this is also a memoir and a meditation on all kinds of things, including swimming, whales and a celebration of the queer, the uncanny and the other writers and artists who happen, over the years, to have drifted into Hoare's vast orbit.
Blake, in Hoare's telling, is not merely a poet or a painter but a kind of spectral force. Take the visionary works of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake sets out his radical ideas on good and evil, illustrated with his own engravings, and where humans are transformed into mythic beings. 'Blake remade us in imaginary form,' Hoare writes. 'He did it to embody his fantastical ideas. He 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.'
As a writer, Hoare seems perfectly happy in his own skin, drifting unabashed through the cultural landscape, diving into whatever niche and crevice takes his fancy. There's no real argument here, no thesis, nothing you probably couldn't find out anywhere else. Thus, we move, in no particular order, from Blake to reflections and remarks on the life of and work Paul Nash and Derek Jarman, and then from Oscar Wilde to David Bowie, from Moby-Dick to Paradise Lost, through the lives of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Nancy Cunard and Iris Murdoch, and on and on. These figures aren't necessarily explicitly connected to Blake, but more by the subtlest of currents that ripple endlessly outwards from him, like the aftershocks of a wave.
As a result, at times, the book reads a bit like a student art house film from the 1970s, with sequences of random jump cuts and juxtapositions. At one moment it's Paul Nash standing in a field, then suddenly it's Derek Jarman: 'Forty years later, in the summer of 1973, Jarman stood in the same field, filming through a yellow filter as if he were visiting another planet. You can almost hear him breathe. The heat peels away a veneer.'
As a creator of hybrid beings and shimmering visions, Blake's art can be rather overwhelming. Hoare understands this: 'Blake takes a lot of looking at. He makes your eyes ache. He takes a lot out of you. His demands. It's all those pictures and that mirror-writing. Each one a window into his head. I'm not sure I can take any more. Everything's a bit jittery. I don't feel I have the right to be here.' Then again, for Hoare, you also 'get more for your money with Blake. He's the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds. […] Deeply theatrical, Blakeworld™ is a terrifying Christmas pantomime, a furious ghost-train ride.' These sorts of asides are reminders of Hoare's unique and idiosyncratic voice: part scholar, part mystic, part Quentin Crisp-ish raconteur.
Hoare himself – whose real name is Patrick Moore – drifts continually in and out of the frame. He visits Ireland, for example, a place of ancestral significance: 'With my name, Patrick Kevin Moore, you'd think I would have worked out all this belonging long before.' But belonging, in Hoare's world, is never a given; identity is as fluid as the sea. He pops up, for example, at Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields, and along the Sussex coast where both Blake and Hoare have sought inspiration. But otherwise, his presence in the book remains spectral, a figure glimpsed between the waves.
In Hoare's estimation, Blake 'could hardly keep up with himself'. The same could be said of this book, which often seems on the verge of overflowing, unable to remain confined within the boundaries of a single subject. It's not just a book about Blake: it's a Blakean book.