Expectations of Darkness: The “Blind Poet” P. B. Marston

Abstract

If Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887) is remembered at all today, he is remembered as a “blind poet”, a protege of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the later Pre-Raphaelite movement.1 This essay demonstrates that in his first volume of poetry, published in 1871, Marston actually fought to establish a poetic identity for himself that was distinct from his visual impairment. A consideration of the nineteenth-century pressures to “pass” as able-bodied or to “perform” his disability, pressures that I show to be compounded by Victorian ideals of post-Romantic poetic identity, demonstrates Marston’s engagement with contemporary debates over the role and remit of the poet.