Which English poet wrote Paradise Lost while blind?

Milton, who went completely blind in his early forties, probably from glaucoma, and composed the poem in his head at night before dictating it in the morning to whoever was available - his daughters, friends, paid amanuenses. Around ten thousand lines of blank verse, assembled without being able to read back what he had written.

He had spent the previous two decades as a political propagandist rather than a poet. He wrote defending the execution of Charles I and served Cromwell's government, and at the Restoration he was in genuine danger - arrested, his books burned by the hangman, and saved apparently by the intervention of friends including, according to tradition, the royalist poet Andrew Marvell.

The poem's problem is that Satan is the most compelling character in it. He gets the best lines, the defiance, the psychological interiority; God explains. Blake's remark that Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it has hung over it ever since, and readers have argued for three centuries about whether that is a failure of the theology or the point - a poem about temptation that does not make rebellion attractive would not be doing its job.