The Title
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, as the strangeness of the title suggests, is not a traditional biography. You do not really start reading about William Blake‘s life until about 50 pages in, and even then the story starts with him aged 43 and moving to Felpham, England. It is not an art history book. The illustrations are small, monochrome, and generally unlabelled. They act as visual punctuations rather than sources of reference.
The term “narrative nonfiction” gives some sense of the ambition and style of the book which freewheels across time and space, between the personal and the historic, in a series of long, untitled chapters. All the clues are there on the title page. The sea functions both literally and metaphorically, symbolizing depth, fluidity, and an uncontrollable force. The monsters are personal demons, social ills, and imagined fears. Above all, however, this is a book about love and obsession as a driving creative force.
The Author
Philip Hoare is a distinguished writer who has published ten books to date, including Leviathan or the Whale which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2009. His fascination with the sea is an enduring aspect of his life and work. He lives in Southampton, on the south coast of England, and swims daily. 2013’s The Sea Inside explored stories collected from sea-based communities he visited on a journey across the globe. Whales are another ongoing theme and his recent book focused on Albrecht Durer’s encounter with a whale which Hoare used as a starting point to explore the artist’s representations of animals.
Hoare also has an interest in queer history. In addition to his biography of Noël Coward, he has curated an exhibition about Derek Jarman‘s love of nature and wrote about homophobia during the First World War in Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand. Both Jarman and Oscar Wilde are recurring figures in Sea Monsters.
Just Dive In
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love starts at the end, or perhaps in the middle, with a kaleidoscopic journey from the present day back to the dawn of the 19th century. Derek Jarman, artist Paul Nash, and Hoare himself are drawn to the seashore, to the whale-like monoliths of Avebury in southern England, and to the art of William Blake. Through them, Hoare connects, like a string of beads, the 1906 exhibition of Blake’s work, memories of Oscar Wilde, and John Singer Sargent‘s portrait of W Graham Robertson, who collected Blake’s work.
The opening chapter conjures magic and beauty. It is a world of misfits and outsiders, who somehow find their place through art and literature. Some of the connections seem tenuous: Wilde’s sophistication and Robertson’s effete urban style seem at odds with Blake’s directness. Nash’s affinity with Blake is well known, as is his deep, mystical love of the English landscape. However, Hoare is not interested in making easy aesthetic comparisons. He wants to immerse you in a multi-layered world.
William Blake
William Blake is a difficult artist to pin down at the best of times: Hoare describes him as an artistic Willy Wonka, suggesting benevolent oddness, with perhaps not quite the right level of intensity. He certainly does not try to give a rounded account of Blake’s life and work. If you are looking for the writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience you will probably not find him here, although The Sick Rose gets a mention (mediated through Benjamin Britten and Derek Jarman).
However, all the key points of Blake’s life are present: the accusation of sedition, the nudism, the unique printmaking techniques, the increasing poverty. Hoare is excellent at making a small incident emblematic, describing in detail Blake’s horror at seeing a child ill-treated. Most importantly, like other recent writers, he continues the re-centering of Blake’s wife, Catherine. He writes about their relationship with huge empathy, describing them as merged into one, and the description of Blake’s death and burial are genuinely moving.
Paul Nash
The second section of Sea Monsters is devoted to Paul Nash (1889–1946), the British Surrealist. Hoare concentrates on the parallels between Nash and Blake, whom he admires. They were both printmakers and writers as well as artists. Both spent time in Sussex. They both explored ideas of Englishness. In this vein, he invests Nash’s relationship with fellow artist Eileen Agar (1899–1991) with “soul mate” significance, despite both being married to other people.
This emphasis on connections to Blake means that Nash’s First World War paintings are rather underplayed. Samuel Palmer, who is a shadowy presence throughout the book, could also be given more of a role: he is the mediator through which landscapist Nash interprets the essentially figurative work of Blake. However, Hoare comes into his own describing the ghostly, metallic sea of crashed German planes in Totes Meer: monsters of a very different, modern kind.
Swimming or Drowning
The third section of the book becomes increasingly amorphous, taking in figures as diverse as David Bowie, James Joyce, Irish Murdoch, and Francis Bacon. The writing, too, breaks down in recognition of its modernist subject matter. There are crossings out, italics, single phrase lines. Hoare’s page of quotations about the sea from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, arguably the least readable book in the English language, seems almost an admission that he has pushed things as far as he can go.
By the time it comes together again, with an extended look at the life and death of T. E. Lawrence, a man associated with Arabia and Afghanistan, we seem to have swum a long way from the shore. It is in danger of becoming a little too self-indulgent, as I think, even the author realizes. But Hoare does not want his reader to drown. He throws us a lifeline.
It Ends with Love
Directly through Hoare’s eyes, the reader is taken back to the art, to Blake’s great color prints, Pity, Newton, and Nebuchadnezzar. He sees them, not on display, but taken out of a box in storage and is rendered speechless, able only to quote Blake’s poetry back at them. Fragile yet powerful. Newton sits, impossibly, at the bottom of the ocean, perfecting his theories, perfect in form.
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We are told the series of accidents and near miracles that enabled the prints to survive, passed finally from the collection of Robertson to the care of the Tate, saved for the nation on the eve of the Second World War. Then, we see six, whole-page reproductions of Blake’s last great project, The Book of Job. It recounts the ultimate test of love in which God heaps misery upon misery on his most faithful follower. In the end, this is a story of the way art can inspire devotion across time and space, the way it can link and bind us.
Should You Buy It?
Anyone familiar with Philip Hoare’s other books has probably already got Sea Monsters on pre-order. If you are looking for a basic biography of William Blake or if you are seeking to enjoy his art, this is not the book for you. Equally, this is not a book to skim lightly: it is complex, diffuse, occasionally frustrating. However, if you are looking for an enthralling and addictive deep-dive into what makes artists tick, this is a fantastic read. Hoare can conjure up connections between seemingly disparate ideas, people, and chronologies, and he carries the reader along with the tide. Sometimes it feels exhausting but it is exhilarating too.
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare (464 pages) is published by Pegasus Books, available April 10, 2025 in the UK and May 6, 2025 in the USA.