William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love

A poet, painter and printmaker who was unappreciated and considered mad in his own time, Blake was eventually lauded as a key pillar of the Romantic movement. His posthumous influence reverberates endlessly, spanning our views on science and art to our ongoing anxieties around technological advancement. With Blake occupying the narrative centre as a visionary and mythical inspiration, we discover the interconnectedness of artists and writers who came after him, from Paul Nash to Derek Jarman. Snaking around the intersections of history, memoir and art, Hoare looks to the sea while drawing a line from one figure to another, tracing their relationships to the natural world while always returning to the haunting genius of William Blake.

Auteur

Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of narrative non-fiction. His book, Leviathan, Or The Whale won the Samuel Johnson Prize. His most recent book, Albert & the Whale, prompted the New York Times to call the author 'a forceful weather system of his own'. He is curator of the digital Moby-Dick and the Ancient Mariner Big Reads, with readings from Tilda Swinton, David Attenborough, Willem Dafoe, Iggy Pop, Hilary Mantel, Marianne Faithfull, Jeanette Winterson, Fiona Shaw, Jeremy Irons, etc. In 2022 he curated Derek Jarman's Modern Nature with the John Hansard Gallery. He has collaborated with artists such as Pet Shop Boys, John Waters, Dorothy Cross and Ellen Gallagher, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian. He has been chased out of the water by killer whales, but still swims in the sea every day.

Texte du rabat

How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry and protest...