William Blake and the necessity of imagination
Philip Hoare: exhilarating, provocative
Alamy/Awakening
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love PHILIP HOARE (4th Estate, 464 PP, £22) Tablet bookshop price £19.80 • tel 020 7799 4064
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is not a biography of William Blake. Nor do literal sea monsters dominate its generous 450-odd pages. Philip Hoare has written something else altogether: a book that is by turns blissful and controversial, uncomfortable and seductive. Less conventional than literary biography, less literal than natural history, and altogether unparaphrasable, it reads as a single genre-hopping poetic riff.
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