Book of the Week: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE SEA MONSTERS OF LOVE by Philip Hoare

The legacy of William Blake stretches 200 years to today not only through poetry and art but traditions of social, spiritual, sexual and political noncomformity. Philip Hoare drags himself from the company of whales and follows Derek Jarman to follow Paul Nash to photograph the megaliths at Avebury and towards a shared encounter with the luminous William Blake, electrically alive and inspiring to them all. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the unfettered genius of William Blake. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. As Hoare shows, art and poetry still have the power to make change.

• Slumber on the banks.

• Swimming or drowning.

• The ecstasy of art.

• Why William Blake became a queer icon.

• William Blake’s radicalism.

• William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs.

• Other books by Philip Hoare.