Sadness intensifies the perceptions of the eyes so that the inner eyes see a new form of beauty like Rimbaud or like the deaf Beethoven or the blind Homer and Milton.

Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.

In the treachery of Benedict Arnold he found a drama so compelling that, as he says here, "even blind Homer might not have scorned a drama so rich."

Not just his inner world, but his only world- because for blind Homer, the world outside was something forever beyond his reach.

During the First World War, Maurice Baring wrote of: Such fighting as blind Homer never sung, No Hector nor Achilles never knew; High in the empty blue.

It made his childish bosom heave and swell when it was gone; and sent the globes, the books, blind Homer and Minerva, swimming round the room.

If blind Homer had sung such a preposterous tale, people would have gotten up and left the tavern.

The cases range from blind Homer to consumptive R. L. Stevenson and are much more numerous than English professors seem to be aware of.

'Have not I made blind Homer sing to me?'

Mark Waterman, as a blind Homer and a bingo caller, and Grant Neale, as an usher called on to read Spinoza, deliver especially fine cameo turns.