Philip Hoare on William Blake and “Monstrous Pictures of Whales”
About this episode
Philip Hoare discusses the duality of the leviathan in William Blake's work and its influence on Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
“The leviathan is both positive and negative,” says Philip Hoare on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The image is almost yin and yang: there is the behemoth, kind of a hippopotamus-elephant-rhinoceros, and the leviathan, which is a sea serpent, but has elements of a sperm whale skeleton that Blake had actually seen. So there is this struggle for good and evil. He acknowledged that you have to have heaven to balance hell and vice versa. But it seems the balance has been interrupted by the sea and he is too close to the power of the ocean.” In this week’s two-part episode, Donovan Hohn speaks with Philip Hoare, author, most recently, of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love . Their conversation, like the book, is a séance that channels many ghosts—the ghosts of writers such as John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde; the ghosts of artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, Derek Jarman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andy Warhol, and Paul Nash; the ghosts of a great many historical and cultural figures. David Bowie and John Waters both make memorable appearances. But the conversation’s presiding spirit is artist, printmaker, poet, and proto-punk…
More episodes of The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
- Adrienne Mayor on Geomyths
- Robert Moor on Trees
- Anne Fadiman on Essays, Personal and Historical
- Morgan Meis on Three Painters (Rubens, Marc, Mitchell)
- Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on the Offshore World
- Episode 22: James Romm on Plato and Tyranny
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly podcast page.