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

From the acclaimed author of Albert and the Whale, a revelatory and joyous meditation on the iconic William Blake.

William 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 equalled. His color prints that develop before your eyes like Polaroids, morphing into scenes under the deep ocean or in the starry heavens above. Even in his own time, his fans and followers were left speechless.

"He is pure energy," said his young admirer, Samuel Palmer. When Blake wrote Jerusalem, it was his plea for a world without slavery and oppression, a world where people would not be defined or constrained by their colour, their sexuality, their gender, their beliefs or their dreams. It was a clarion call for what our world could be.

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. Blake has the power to heal and transform our world. His art is fluid, not static, not stuck in the past. He printed it so that it would become immortal, continuing on long after he had gone. Even when he died, he just floated through the ceiling, singing; he said it was no more than stepping into another room.

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. Turning London into Albion: William and Kate and their majestic, interspecies, inter-everything menagerie 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 the new spirit, the new age, the new hope for the whole human and non-human race.