Opinion | Writing With Your Eyes Closed

I have a special interest in Milton and Borges — and became aware of Burcat — because of my own diminished eyesight. More than a year and a half ago, I woke up with profoundly blurry, clouded vision in my right eye and learned that I’d had a sort of stroke of the optic nerve. The damage was permanent.

What happened to me is technically known as nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or Naion, which could strike my left eye, too: There’s a roughly 20 percent chance of that. After I recounted this in a column, Burcat reached out to me. Naion was the culprit in his blindness.

He and I have tools available to us — audiobooks, voice-to-text technology, enormous computer screens on which letters can be supersized — that weren’t around decades, let alone centuries, ago. But James Wilson, who was blind, nonetheless produced “Biography of the Blind” in the early 1800s. In the early 1900s, Helen Keller, who was deaf as well as blind, wrote autobiographical books and essays.

Homer is often portrayed as blind, though it’s hard to know what to make of that: Scholars haven’t determined whether Homer was one poet or a group of them.

There have been enough blind or seriously visually challenged writers that Heather Tilley, a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, wrote a book that focused just on those of the Victorian era. It’s titled “Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing.”

When I spoke with her recently, I learned about Frances Browne, an Irish poet and novelist in the 19th century who was blind from early childhood but used what she’d heard of the world for literature that betrayed little if any hint of that.

I learned about a celebrated, widely read 19th-century travel writer, James Holman, who made his treks and fashioned his prose after he lost his eyesight. “Although he relies on the people who are around him to describe things officially to him, there’s also quite a strong sense of smell, of the motion of traveling in a carriage, of how the air feels,” Tilley said. “The writing feels more multisensory.”