William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, Philip Hoare, Fourth Estate, 464pp, £22

Towards the end of his life, William Blake wrote that: ‘Mere natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in me.’ Natural objects, he believed, were just pallid likenesses of spiritual objects, and it was those sublime originals that fired him. So a ‘natural’ biography with a cradle to grave chronology and rich in dates and verbatim anecdotes (and in Blake’s case a healthy dose of explication) would not have been welcome to him. However, Philip Hoare’s Blakean book – profoundly odd, poetic, encompassing, soaring, unapologetic, and at times near incomprehensible – might well have been.

William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is an omnium-gatherum of a work into which Hoare pours every drop of his adoration for the poet-artist-mystic, and there is a lot of adoration to pour. The book is an act of worship: at one point Hoare visits the cottage in Felpham on the Sussex coast where Blake and his wife Catherine lived from 1800 to 1803 and when he sneaks a moment alone there, ‘I fall to my knees and kiss the boards where his feet walked.’ This is not standard biographical practice. Later, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, he tries on Blake’s spectacles and suddenly, ‘I’m looking through his eyes. It is like being in his brain… I am seeing what he could see. The world according to him.’ This is not the response of a sober-sides Life writer.

Blake, the great creator of a personal mythology, is the central figure in Hoare’s own private cosmos. And like Blake’s teeming inner world with its bewildering deities and personifications – Urizen, Orc, Enitharmon, Los, Albion et al – just how Hoare’s fits together, and what it amounts to, can be almost as impenetrable.

This, however, is not only an account of what Blake means to Hoare but also of his effect on a select group of historical fellow adherents and how they were linked in the two centuries after Blake’s death in 1827. To follow just one strand: in 1906, the 16-year-old would-be artist Paul Nash first encountered Blake’s work when he stepped into the Carfax Gallery on Piccadilly; the Carfax was owned by Robbie Ross, former lover of Oscar Wilde; another lover was W. Graham Robertson who bought every Blake he could lay his hands on and later presented them to the nation; Robertson was painted by John Singer Sargent, who also painted Henry James; James’ father was a Blake disciple, while James was a friend of the painter William Blake Richmond, whose name reflected his father’s close friendship with Blake himself. And so on, through Sarah Bernhardt, Wilfred Owen, Noël Coward and down.

The gayness of this family tree is not coincidental. Hoare sees Blake as a man untrammelled by conventional sexual mores; ‘To Blake’, he says, ‘sex was a mere restriction of time. He believed the advanced human was androgynous.’ Meanwhile Blake and Catherine would sit naked in their garden, telling visitors to ‘Come on in. It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.’ This unjudgmental character, his outsider life (like Wilde, he had been menaced by the law, in his case accused of sedition on a trumped-up charge) and the drum-taut muscular nudes of his pictures made him a hero figure, says Hoare, to gay men and sexually fluid figures. Among the acolytes Hoare alights on are TE Lawrence (who, in another link, was first taught Arabic by Paul Nash’s wife) and Derek Jarman, Robert Mapplethorpe and Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie and Iris Murdoch. So the Yellow Book lineage made a fetish of the author of the Prophetic Books.

Into this heady theme Hoare folds any number of other topics. Whales feature prominently, as one might expect from the author of Leviathan, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He notes that a series of the creatures took wrong turnings up the Thames during Blake’s lifetime including, in 1791, an orca that was harpooned off Greenwich; whales, leviathans and sea monsters feature frequently in his illustrated books; and Lambeth, where Blake lived for a while, had two factories that refined oil from spermaceti.

The sea, in which Hoare swims daily and lay a couple of hundred yards from the Blakes’ Felpham cottage, ebbs and flows throughout the book. Hoare is more at home here than with the Londoner Blake and he uses his immersions and thoughts of what lies above and beneath to reflect both on the mental universe of the poet-painter and his own life. If the book is a not-quite biography of Blake it is also a not-quite memoir of Hoare himself.

There are, however, partial biographies of assorted Blakeans – T.E. Lawrence at Clouds Hill, his primitive house in Dorset, where the most famous – and mysterious – man in England sequestered himself (Hoare’s interest in Lawrence is perhaps no surprise – they look remarkably similar); James Joyce, who lectured on Blake and filled Ulysses with references to him; and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the heiress, muse and activist Nancy Cunard who caused a scandal in the late 1920s when she took an African-American jazz musician Henry Crowder as her lover and spent her time in Harlem.

When he treats Blake himself, Hoare provides some straight details about where he lived, who he saw, how he worked, as well as some choice nuggets that reveal his personality (apparently he walked around singing his poems to tunes of his own devising), but his default tone is near ecstatic. Blake to him is as much an object of projection as reality: ‘Someone full of mystery and grace, someone from another time and another place.’

Each fact arrives heavily encrusted with words – a great many of them – that emerge foaming from Hoare like so much ectoplasm. Blake was: ‘an astro-priest launched into the unknown, ready to leave the shell of himself in the alien dust as the sun turned black and his spirit hurtled on’; he is ‘the great director, the high auteur; dramatist of his own art, dictator of his own fate’; a man who, ‘with no offspring of his own… generated life in his art. His star children hang over the abyss, suspended in amniotic sacs; semaphore beings ready to spring out, lithe and pulsating, torsos networked with visible veins’, and so much else besides.

In such effusions, Hoare is emulating Blake: if each picture or illustrated text was indeed ‘an emanation of everything that was in Blake’s head’ then every page of Hoare’s book is a similar emanation. At one point he addresses his audience, somewhat ominously: ‘Am I reading the right book? you may ask. It’s a bit late now; we’re a third of the way through and there’s a lot more of this to come.’ It is not what some word-battered readers will want to hear.

While there is something admirable in encountering an author so obviously entranced by his subject and who writes in word poems and images that can be both inventive and gorgeous, for the more prosaically-minded reader, whose investment in Blake is less all-in, it can be a bit too much. Blake is baffling enough on his own terms, he hardly needs further mystifying.

This then is not the place to come for a scholarly unpicking of Blake’s paintings or his words – though Hoare’s reading is impressively broad – but rather for a rush of free-wheeling impressions and connections. ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, wrote Blake, but here less world and a few more grains of sand would do.