Milton and Blindness

Abstract

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671), experienced deterioration of his eyesight in his late thirties and became unsighted in his mid-forties, with progressive loss of vision occurring between 1645 and 1652, years of tumultuous developments in the political life of England and in Milton’s personal life. Milton ultimately spent some three decades of his life—three decades of an intensely productive writing, thinking, and composing life—in unmistakable loss of sight and its attendant anxieties, medical interventions, social and personal strategies for coping and composition, and intellectual sifting of what it meant to go blind in an ocularcentric world. Paradise Lost, which is considered by many to be the defining epic in the English language, was composed by its author in a state of complete sightlessness, and through a collaborative, oral-aural dictation and editorial process that scholars are still working to understand. Milton explicitly addressed his loss of sight in poetic terms in works such as his sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent,” in the invocations to Paradise Lost, and through the ocular condition of the protagonist of his closet drama Samson Agonistes. Even when not directly mentioned or evoked, however, the blindness remained an aesthetic and material factor informing Milton’s compositions in the final decades of his life.