William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World

A New Yorker Best Books of 2025

A Best Book of the Year from The Spectator, New Statesman, and The Times

A revelatory and joyous exploration of how one visionary inspired two-hundred years of art, poetry and protest by the acclaimed author of Albert and the Whale

Weaving between the historical, cultural, and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired by the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake.

Blake is one of the greatest artists in western history. His art envelops us. He invented a way to put words and images on a page to express his poetry and art in a manner that has never been truly equaled. Even in his own time, his fans and followers were left speechless.

Blake's heavenly bodies are our real selves, soaring beyond time and space. His art is a time machine. We can climb aboard and be taken to the stars. Blake accepted no limits to the human spirit.

Throughout his life he worked as one-artist, two-people with his partner, Kate. Together they created their visions of what the world could be, filled with majestic menageries of tygers burning bright and angels in trees, of leviathans and demons and human fleas and a devil who burns with revolutionary ecstasy.

In William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, with Philip Hoare as our inimitable guide, Blake rises as a new hope for our own era.