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Milton, of course, did have the mnemonic advantage of being a poet. Poetry is far easier to memorize than prose. Think of how snatches of songs lodge in our minds, regardless of our intention to retain them. Even now you can probably recall nursery rhymes you haven't repeated since childhood.
Milton rarely commented directly upon his blindness, except for the famous 1652 sonnet "On His Blindness." When I first read this poem as a student, Milton's reference to his age was what struck me most: "When I consider how my light is spent / E're half my days, in this dark world and wide." The loss of productive years seemed the great tragedy to me then. Now I hear the sorrow for lost sight that seeps through the words like blood through a bandage. Despite the self-abnegation of the last line, "They also serve who only stand and wait," his acquiescence to a chiding and exacting God seems wrung from him at a great cost.
Milton never uses the word "blind" in the entire poem, alluding to his loss only as light either "spent" or "denied." The reason he mourns this loss, however, is clear. He expects that the "one Talent which is death to hide" will now prove "useless." In that terrible year when the light finally went out altogether, he was left bereft of any hope of writing poetry. He could not have known then how wrong he was.
A story grew up that the blind poet dictated his masterpiece to his three daughters. Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Milton, discounts this report by pointing out the daughters' lack of sufficient education. Milton—so the skeptics insist—pressed into service those visitors who possessed sufficient learning and adequate penmanship to record his latest lines.
Still, the image of the poet dictating to his daughters persists. One of Milton's admirers reported that the poet would lie awake composing verses in his head. If inspiration struck in the middle of the night, he would summon a daughter from her bed to take down the words lest they should be lost again in sleep. Milton was said to dictate up to 40 lines at a time. His daughters commented that their father was like a cow, waiting to be milked of his pent-up words in the morning.
James Joyce, for the most part, wrote novels instead of poetry. As Susan Sontag has observed, "prose writers, who work in a lumberyard of words, can't hold it all in their heads."1 (Some critics have suggested that this difficulty is precisely what accounts for that jumble of a lumberyard, Finnegans Wake.)
Like Milton, Joyce was drawn into Homer's orbit. But while Milton had modeled his imagination on Homer's world of heroes and gods, Joyce's aim was to turn that world on its head. Joyce's Ulysses borrows its title, format, and main characters from Homeric epic, but Leopold Bloom is no hero and the promiscuous Molly no faithful Penelope.
Milton and Joyce were also both rebels and subversives. Though Milton slaved away in the service of the Commonwealth, his religion was no party-line Puritanism, as anyone who reads Areopagitica and his defense of divorce can see. Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical protagonist of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, echoes the famous words of Milton's Satan: "Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven." Dedalus vows "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe." His renunciation includes family, fatherland, and church.
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