One of the theses advanced in this book is familiar and tends to be taken for granted, namely that the Romantic period is indebted to ‘the ancient topos of the blind poet or seer, a visionary whose sight, having lost this world's presence, is directed entirely beyond to the spiritual.’ These are William Paulson's words from his book on the blind in France in that period. However, while there is an assumption that the topos is relevant to an understanding of British Romanticism, nobody has ever claimed that it is developed in a straightforward fashion in a wide range of significant literary works. If they had, there would be books and articles which took this view; but these do not exist. Nor does my book make such a claim. On the other hand, there is a general awareness of the influence of the idea of Homer's or Milton's or Ossian's blindness, combined with a specific awareness of individual texts, such as Blake's ‘Tiriel’, Wordsworth's ‘The Blind Highland Boy’, or Keats's ‘To Homer’, and of individual passages, such as the encounter with the Blind Beggar in Prelude VII, or the De Lacey episode in Frankenstein. However, none of these examples is straightforward in the sense of conveying the idea of inward vision as superior to outward.