The poet demands not that the Muse show but tell: “Sing to me, O Muse!” The invocation of the Muse at the start of all great epics announces the poet’s receptivity, and that receptivity is a matter of ears, not eyes. Both the lack of sight and the gift of poetry come from the gods. The famous passage sets forth the concept reiterated in Western culture again and again: the poetic gift is compensation for the physical lack of sight. This is from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of The Odyssey. She gave him two gifts, good and bad: / she took his sight away, but gave sweet song.” When Odysseus meets the blind bard Demodocus in the court of King Alcinous (leader of the Phaeacians) the moment feels rather meta: the fictional blind bard of the Odyssey as stand-in for the legendary blind author Homer: “The house boy brought the poet, whom the Muse / adored. The tradition of the blind bard in Western literature originates not in histories or biographies of Homer, but in The Odyssey itself. These epics as they’ve come down to us should be understood as a kind of tapestry of older legends and stories sung by many bards in many different versions, some of which were codified under the authorial name Homer. The two great epic poems associated with the name Homer were probably composed in the 8th or 7th century BCE, about events during ( The Iliad) and after ( The Odyssey) the Trojan War, which itself, if historic, took place a few hundred years earlier in a distant heroic age. Most accounts of Homer come to us from centuries after he purportedly lived, and even in the ancient world there existed skepticism regarding his blindness, as succinctly represented by Proclus (a philosopher of late antiquity), who in his Life of Homer turned the doubt into a kind of aphorism: “Those who have stated that he was blind seem to me to be mentally blind themselves, for he saw more clearly than any man ever.”Īlthough this kind of ocularcentrism (how can a blind person speak clearly about the visible world?) will be echoed about other blind writers from John Milton to Helen Keller, the idea that Homer was blind has endured. Homer, the author generally credited with the composition of The Iliad and The Odyssey-two of the oldest works of Western literature-is in large part responsible for the tradition of the blind bard, and yet so little is known about him and his life that most scholars believe him (and his blindness) to be legendary.
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