‘William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love' Review: Eye of the Tyger

Wall Street Journal

13-06-2025

William Blake's twin talents came from a singular genius. The entrancing paintings and engravings that make up his great art comprise the biblical and the phantasmagorical: shimmering angels and dancing fairies, vengeful gods and baleful monsters, a tormented Satan and a refulgent Albion. Blake's poetry, which he illustrated—or as he termed it, 'illuminated'—range from the short, accessible and memorable verse of his 1794 collection, 'Songs of Innocence and Experience,' to the denser 'prophetic books' that revolve around personal mythologies and cosmologies involving heavenly realms and fallen worlds. With his original words and images—some derived from visions—Blake proved a true one-off among his English Romantic contemporaries. Indeed, carving his own niche was key to his artistic approach. As the 'eternal prophet' called Los declares in 'Jerusalem' (1820): 'I must create a system or be enslav'd by another man's.'
Philip Hoare's 'William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love' has this poet, artist and mystic at its center but, as its title suggests, this is no conventional study. As in Mr. Hoare's 2021 work, 'Albert and the Whale,' which retraced the journeys and examined the art of Albrecht Dürer while also branching out to encompass other themes and lives, the writer here takes in both his central subject, an eccentric and enigmatic enchanter, and the many creative minds that have fallen under Blake's spell.
When Blake first appears in Mr. Hoare's pages, he is 43 years old and embarking on a new stage of his career. Mr. Hoare tells how Blake left his native London in 1800 with his wife, Catherine, and his trusty printing press (or 'engine of anarchy') for the coastal town of Felpham to illustrate the poems of William Hayley. 'I labour incessantly,' he wrote to his friend and patron Thomas Butts. 'I accomplish not one half of what I intend, because my abstract folly hurries me away while I am at work, carrying me over mountains and valleys, which are not real, into a land of abstraction where spectres of the dead wander.' Blake felt the blunt force of reality in 1803 when he had an altercation with a soldier in his garden. Blake thought Pvt. John Schofield was trespassing; in actual fact he had been employed by Blake's gardener. Blake frogmarched the man off his property but faced criminal charges as a result. His acquittal brought an end to what Mr. Hoare calls 'the worst time in his life.'
It also brought him back in that same year to London, where he lived in relative poverty and obscurity until his death in 1827. Mr. Hoare maps Blake's various addresses in the city and shows how this 'pagan place for all its bishops and spires' informed his art. Mr. Hoare also explores that other, more fantastical terrain he calls 'Blakeworld,' where this 'superrealist' visionary let his seemingly limitless imagination run wild.