However, as with many medical conditions and disabilities, power structures of subsequent periods have consigned blindness and poor vision to the cultural margins, as Foucault elucidates in Madness and Civilization. Many great writers have been blind or suffered from low vision, perhaps most famously the Epic Greek poet Homer who was a blind bard, gifted with lyrical talent and a tenacious influence.
John Milton, poet and author of the epic Paradise Lost, experienced visual deterioration during the English Civil War until he suffered total loss of sight in 1652. Visual impairment affected the construction of his poetry as much as the content. Sonnet XIX is the oft-quoted hymn of blindness:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless.
Despite his personal ordeals in 1656 (divorce, death of his second wife, loss of child, gout, and narrowly avoided execution for supporting regicide), Milton awoke every morning to dictate verses of Paradise Lost to his amanuensis – fancy word for ascribe. He would commit ten-line segments to memory each night in preparation for the morning’s work.
Considering the poem is ten-thousand lines, that’s some dedication. There are many theories around Milton’s blindness, yet the most likely causes are glaucoma, retinal detachment, a pituitary cyst, or optic neuropathy. Henry Fuseli’s painting Milton Dictating to His Daughter depicts Milton slumped in a throne, glassy-eyed, his daughters shrouded in light, penning his Biblical epic.
Suffering from syphilitic uveitis, modernist luminary James Joyce’s eye condition was painfully inhibitive. Joyce had around a dozen eye surgeries without general anaesthetic, and his post-surgical eyepatch became an iconic trademark of this glorious outlier. Kelvin Birmingham writes, ‘by the age of forty-eight, Joyce’s lefteye functioned at only one-eight-hundredth the normal capacity and his “good”eye at one-thirtieth. His eyeglasses prescription was +17 in both eyes – severely farsighted’. Despite his visual acuity, he wrote some of the most groundbreaking work of the twentieth century, including his 1922 magnum opus Ulysses.