John Milton

John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, in the City of London. His father, also named John Milton, was a scrivener and amateur composer who had been disinherited by his own Catholic father after converting to Protestantism. The family was prosperous, and the elder Milton spent generously on his son's education, hiring private tutors before sending the boy to St Paul's School, which stood a short walk from the family home ^[1].

At St Paul's, Milton studied Latin and Greek intensively and began Hebrew. He later recalled reading so late into the night as a boy that he blamed those habits for his eventual blindness. In 1625 he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, where his fair complexion and serious manner reportedly earned him the nickname 'the Lady of Christ's' ^[2]. His time at Cambridge was not entirely smooth: a quarrel with his first tutor led to a brief rustication, a temporary suspension, in 1626.

Milton took his bachelor's degree in 1629 and his master's in 1632. That same year, while still an undergraduate mindset lingered, he wrote the ode 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity', the earliest of his poems to display real ambition. Anyone studying a John Milton biography notices how deliberately he prepared himself for greatness: after Cambridge he retired to his father's houses at Hammersmith and then Horton in Buckinghamshire, spending roughly six years in private study of classical literature, history, and mathematics rather than entering the church as his family had expected ^[1].

The years of retirement produced remarkable early work. Milton wrote the companion poems 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', the masque Comus (performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634), and the pastoral elegy 'Lycidas' (1637), written for a Cambridge contemporary drowned in the Irish Sea. 'Lycidas' is often ranked among the finest short poems in English, and it already contained sharp attacks on a corrupt clergy ^[2].

In 1638 Milton left England for a continental tour lasting about fifteen months. He traveled through France to Italy, where he was welcomed in the literary academies of Florence and, by his own account, visited the aged Galileo, then under house arrest near the city ^[3]. News of gathering political crisis at home cut the journey short. He returned to London in 1639, later writing that he thought it dishonorable to travel for pleasure while his countrymen fought for liberty.

Back in London he took pupils, including his nephews Edward and John Phillips, and threw himself into the pamphlet wars that accompanied the collapse of Charles I's government. Between 1641 and 1642 he published five tracts attacking episcopacy, the government of the church by bishops. From this point poetry largely gave way to prose for nearly two decades, as Milton became one of the most conspicuous polemicists of the English Revolution ^[1].

Milton's prose masterpiece arrived in 1644. Areopagitica, addressed to Parliament, argued against the licensing order of 1643 that required books to be approved before printing. Its defense of unlicensed printing, with the famous claim that killing a good book is a kind of homicide against reason itself, became a foundational text for later arguments about press freedom, cited in courtrooms and constitutional debates centuries after his death ^[4]. In the same period he published controversial tracts arguing that incompatibility should be grounds for divorce, and Of Education, a short treatise on reforming schooling.

After the execution of Charles I in January 1649, Milton defended the regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, arguing that a people may hold tyrants to account. Within weeks the new Council of State appointed him Secretary for Foreign Tongues, responsible for composing the republic's Latin correspondence with foreign governments ^[1]. In this office he wrote Eikonoklastes, a rebuttal of the royalist bestseller Eikon Basilike, and the Latin Defensio pro Populo Anglicano (1651), which answered continental critics of the regicide and made his name notorious across Europe.

His crowning achievement came after politics had ruined him. Paradise Lost, an epic in blank verse on the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of Satan, appeared in ten books in 1667; a revised twelve book version followed in 1674. Milton, by then completely blind, composed the poem in his head and dictated it in batches to whoever was available, including his daughters and paid amanuenses. He sold the copyright to the printer Samuel Simmons for an initial payment of five pounds ^[5]. In 1671 he published Paradise Regained, a shorter epic on the temptation of Christ, together with Samson Agonistes, a tragedy modeled on Greek drama about the blinded Israelite champion. Among John Milton achievements, these late poems secured his claim, in the judgment of many critics since, to a place beside Shakespeare at the summit of English literature ^[2].

Milton married three times. In 1642, in his early thirties, he wed seventeen year old Mary Powell, daughter of a royalist Oxfordshire family that owed his father money. Within weeks she returned to her parents, and the couple lived apart for about three years, a separation that coincided with, and probably sharpened, his divorce pamphlets. Mary returned in 1645, and they had four children: Anne, Mary, John (who died in infancy), and Deborah. Mary Powell died in 1652, days after Deborah's birth ^[1].

That same year Milton lost the last of his sight, probably from glaucoma or a related condition, at the age of forty three. He continued his government work with assistants, among them the poet Andrew Marvell. In 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock, who died in early 1658 along with their infant daughter; the sonnet beginning 'Methought I saw my late espoused saint' is generally read as his tribute to her ^[6]. His third marriage, to Elizabeth Minshull in 1663, lasted until his death and by most accounts brought him domestic calm, though his relations with his surviving daughters were strained.

Contemporaries described a disciplined, frugal man who rose early, had books read to him, dictated in the morning, and took daily exercise in his garden. He played the organ, a legacy of his musical father, and kept his learning active to the end. Those searching for John Milton facts often fix on the image recorded by early biographers: the blind poet seated in a grey coat at his door in Bunhill Fields, receiving visitors who came from abroad simply to see him ^[3].

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 put Milton's life in danger. He had defended the killing of the new king's father in print, repeatedly and under his own name. He went into hiding in the summer of 1660 while Parliament debated who should be excluded from pardon; his Defensio and Eikonoklastes were publicly burned by the hangman. Milton was arrested and briefly imprisoned late in 1660, then released after paying fees, spared execution thanks in part, tradition holds, to the intervention of friends including Marvell, by then a member of Parliament ^[1].

Stripped of office and much of his fortune, blind, and politically disgraced, Milton settled into private life, moving eventually to a house in Artillery Walk near Bunhill Fields. It was in these reduced circumstances that he completed Paradise Lost, a fact that has struck readers ever since: the epic of loss and endurance was written by a man who had lost his cause, his sight, and two wives ^[5].

His final years remained productive. Besides Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, he published a History of Britain (1670), a Latin grammar and logic, and in 1673 an expanded edition of his shorter poems. John Milton died on 8 November 1674, a month short of his sixty sixth birthday, probably of complications from gout, and was buried beside his father in the church of St Giles Cripplegate in London ^[2].

Anyone asking who was John Milton in the centuries after 1674 would have received changing answers, and that instability is itself part of his legacy. To the eighteenth century he was the sublime poet of Paradise Lost, imitated endlessly and edited by scholars including Richard Bentley. The Romantics read him against the grain: William Blake wrote that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it', and Satan's defiant speeches influenced Shelley, Byron, and the whole Romantic conception of the heroic rebel ^[7]. Wordsworth opened a sonnet of 1802 with the plea 'Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour'.

His political prose has proved equally durable. Areopagitica shaped later arguments for freedom of expression, and his republican tracts were read by American and French revolutionaries; scholars have traced his influence on founders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams ^[4]. A manuscript treatise on theology attributed to him, De Doctrina Christiana, discovered in 1823, revealed heterodox views on the Trinity and other doctrines that continue to occupy specialists.

Milton's mark on the English language is measurable: he is credited with coining or first recording hundreds of words, among them 'pandemonium', the name he invented for the capital of Hell ^[8]. Universities across the world teach his poetry, the journal Milton Quarterly and the Milton Society of America sustain a large scholarly industry, and his cottage at Chalfont St Giles, where he stayed during the plague of 1665, survives as a museum. Three and a half centuries on, the blind defender of 'the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely' remains one of the most consequential writers England has produced ^[2].