John Milton (1608 - 1674) was an English poet, polemicist and civil servant, author of the epic Paradise Lost. He served the Commonwealth government under Oliver Cromwell as Secretary for Foreign Tongues and wrote extensively in defence of republican government, religious liberty and freedom of the press. [1] He composed his greatest poetry after losing his sight entirely in the early 1650s. [2]
Early life and education
Milton was born on 9 December 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, the son of a prosperous scrivener and composer. He was educated at St Paul's School and then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1632. [1]
Rather than enter the Church as expected, he spent the following years in private study at his father's houses in Hammersmith and Horton, reading widely in classical and modern literature. From 1638 to 1639 he travelled in Italy, meeting scholars in Florence, Rome and Naples and, by his own account, visiting the aged Galileo. [2]
Prose and public service
The outbreak of political and religious conflict in England turned Milton to prose. He produced pamphlets against episcopacy, a series of tracts arguing for the legitimacy of divorce, and in 1644 Areopagitica, a speech addressed to Parliament against the licensing of printing that remains one of the most cited defences of free expression in English. [3]
After the execution of Charles I he defended the regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, handling the Commonwealth's Latin correspondence and writing official defences of the English republic against continental critics. By 1652 his eyesight had failed completely, and he worked thereafter through assistants. [1]
Paradise Lost and the later poems
The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 put Milton in danger; he was briefly imprisoned and fined, and some of his books were burned, but he escaped execution. Living in retirement and wholly blind, he dictated Paradise Lost, published in ten books in 1667 and reissued in twelve books in 1674. [2]
The poem retells the fall of humankind in unrhymed iambic pentameter, declaring an intention to justify the ways of God to men, and gives Satan a rhetorical force that has occupied readers and critics ever since. It was followed by Paradise Regained and the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes, both published in 1671. [1]
Legacy
Milton died in London on 8 November 1674 and was buried at St Giles-without-Cripplegate. His shorter poems, among them Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Comus, are staples of the English lyric tradition. [1]
His influence runs through Dryden, the Romantics, and modern poetry, while Areopagitica is regularly invoked in arguments over censorship and press freedom. [3]
