John Milton

• 1. Introduction

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  John Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the publisher Samuel Simmons, with a promise of five more pounds if the print run sold out. The poet was blind by then, and impoverished. He had dictated all twelve books of his blank-verse epic to a series of aides, unable to see a word of what he made. Milton was born in London in 1608 and died in 1674. Between those dates he was a poet, a polemicist, and a civil servant who wrote propaganda for a regime that beheaded a king. How does a man go from being called the Lady of Christ's College to drafting the foreign correspondence of a republic? Why did he defend the execution of Charles I, then go into hiding when the monarchy returned? And how did a poem written in defeat make him, by some reckonings, second in influence to no English writer but Shakespeare?

• 2. The Lady Of Christ's College

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  Bread Street in London held a tavern called the Mermaid, and it was there, in 1608, that Milton spent his childhood in his father's house. His father, also named John Milton, had been disinherited by his devout Catholic father Richard for embracing Protestantism. The elder Milton moved to London and found lasting success as a scrivener. He was also a skilled composer of music, a talent that gave his son a lifelong love of music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes.

  Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian with an MA from the University of St Andrews, became Milton's private tutor and his introduction to religious radicalism. At St Paul's School in London the boy began Latin and Greek, languages that marked his English poetry and prose for the rest of his life. His earliest datable work is two psalms written at age 15 at Long Bennington.

  John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives, preserved the testimony of Christopher Milton, the poet's younger brother: when he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night. Aubrey added a detail about his appearance. His complexion exceeding faire, he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College.

  Milton entered Christ's College at the University of Cambridge in 1625 and graduated with a BA in 1629, ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year. He may have been suspended in his first year for quarrelling with his tutor, Bishop William Chappell. Among his peers he felt alienated. Having watched fellow students attempt comedy on the college stage, he later said they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools. He received his MA on the 3rd of July 1632.

• 3. Six Years Of Reading

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  Horton, Berkshire, became the setting for six years of self-directed study after Milton took his MA. He read theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and science to prepare for a poetical career. The historian Christopher Hill argued this was no rural retreat, since Horton was becoming deforested and suffered from the plague. From this intensive labour Milton emerged among the most learned of all English poets, with command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian, adding Old English in the 1650s while researching his History of Britain.

  Arcades and Comus, both written in this period, were commissioned as masques for noble patrons connected to the Egerton family, performed in 1632 and 1634. Comus argues for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. He also contributed the pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for a fellow Cambridge student. Drafts of these poems survive in the Trinity Manuscript, named for Trinity College, Cambridge, where it is kept. Charles Mason discovered the packet of thirty loose and tattered folio leaves in the library, recognising their nature around 1735; they were bound for the first time in 1736 and have been called the chief treasure of Trinity Library.

  In May 1638, accompanied by a manservant, Milton set out on a tour of France and Italy that lasted 15 months. He rode to Calais and Paris, carrying a letter from the diplomat Henry Wotton to the ambassador John Scudamore, through whom he met the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius. He reached Florence in July 1638, where his neo-Latin poetry won him friends, and there he met the astronomer Galileo, then under house arrest at Arcetri. In Rome he dined with the English College despite his dislike of the Society of Jesus, and the Vatican librarian Lukas Holste guided him through the collection. Word reached him of civil war at home, and of the death of his childhood friend Charles Diodati, and he turned back toward England in the summer of 1639.

• 4. The Pamphlet Wars

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  Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England, published in 1641, was Milton's first foray into polemics on his return home. He attacked the High-church party of the Church of England and its leader William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, deploying a wide knowledge of church history. He wrote in defence of two Presbyterian divines named Smectymnuus, an acronym whose TY belonged to his old tutor Thomas Young. Working as a private schoolmaster, educating his nephews, he met the educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, which led to his 1644 tract Of Education.

  In June 1642 Milton visited the manor house at Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, and, aged 34, married the 17-year-old Mary Powell. The marriage began badly. Mary disliked his austere life and his nephews, and she had absorbed royalist views from her family. She soon returned to her parents and did not come back until 1645. Her desertion prompted Milton to publish pamphlets arguing for the legality and morality of divorce beyond grounds of adultery, writings that brought him a brush with the authorities in 1643.

  The hostile response to those divorce tracts spurred his most enduring prose. Areopagitica, his speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing addressed to the Parliament of England, appeared in 1644 as a defence of pre-printing censorship's opponents. In it he aligned himself with the parliamentary cause and began to fuse neo-Roman liberty with Christian liberty. He called for the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. During this time he also courted a woman named Davis, who turned him down, before Mary Powell unexpectedly begged him to take her back.

• 5. Servant Of The Republic

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  The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, published in 1649, defended the right of the people to hold their rulers to account and implicitly sanctioned the regicide. That argument earned Milton his appointment as Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. His task was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin, but he also produced propaganda and served as a censor.

  In October 1649 he published Eikonoklastes, a defence of the regicide answering the Eikon Basilike, a best-seller attributed to Charles I that cast the king as a Christian martyr. The exiled Charles II's party then published Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo by the humanist Claudius Salmasius, and the Council ordered Milton to reply. On the 24th of February 1652 he published his Latin Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, the First Defence, which ran to numerous editions and made him a European reputation. In 1654 came the Defensio secunda, praising Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while urging him to stay true to the Revolution's principles.

  By 1652 Milton had become totally blind, the cause debated but likely bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma. He dictated his verse and prose to amanuenses who copied them out, one of them the poet Andrew Marvell, who from 1657 did much of the secretarial work. His sonnet beginning When I Consider How My Light is Spent, later titled On His Blindness by the editor John Newton, is presumed to date from this period. He held the office of Secretary for Foreign Tongues until 1660.

• 6. Fearing For His Life

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  Cromwell's death in 1658 collapsed the English Republic into feuding military and political factions, yet Milton clung to the beliefs that first moved him to write for the Commonwealth. In 1659 he published A Treatise of Civil Power, attacking a state-dominated church. As the Republic disintegrated he wrote The Ready and Easy Way to Establishing a Free Commonwealth, an impassioned and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty. His proposal, backed by reference to the Dutch and Venetian constitutions, was for a council with perpetual membership.

  Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton went into hiding while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings were burnt. He re-emerged after a general pardon, was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned, and was freed when influential friends intervened, among them Marvell, now an MP. He married for the third and final time on the 24th of February 1663, taking Elizabeth Minshull, aged 24, a native of Wistaston in Cheshire. He spent the remaining decade living quietly in London, retiring only to a cottage at Chalfont St. Giles during the Great Plague, his only extant home.

  Milton died on the 8th of November 1674, a month before his 66th birth anniversary, and was buried in St Giles-without-Cripplegate on Fore Street. It is disputed whether the cause was consumption or gout. An early biographer recorded that his funeral drew his learned and great Friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the Vulgar. A monument was added to Westminster Abbey in 1737.

• 7. The Blind Man's Epic

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  Composed between 1658 and 1664, Paradise Lost was the work of a poet who was blind and impoverished, dictating to a series of aides. The poem addresses the fall of man, the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It has been read as reflecting Milton's despair at the failure of the Revolution while affirming an optimism in human potential, with some critics finding in it his unyielding support for the Good Old Cause. The first run was a quarto priced at three shillings per copy, published in August 1667, and it sold out in eighteen months.

  Paradise Regained, its sequel, was published in 1671 alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes, both shaped by Milton's post-Restoration situation. Samson's blindness and captivity, mirroring Milton's own lost sight, may stand as a metaphor for England's blind acceptance of Charles II. Just before his death in 1674 Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost with an explanation of why the poem rhymes not and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell.

  That refusal to rhyme was deliberate. Milton was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside the theatre or translations. He called the neglect of rhyme an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming. Isaac Watts said in 1734 that Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us. He also coined new English words from Latin and Ancient Greek, a vocabulary later poets called the Miltonian dialect.

• 8. The Long Shadow

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  Samuel Johnson, a Tory who called Milton's politics those of an acrimonious and surly republican, still ranked Paradise Lost first among human productions in design and second in performance. Such was the pattern of Milton's afterlife, a reputation that oscillated with politics. His biographer William Hayley named him the greatest English author. By some scholars he was held second in influence to none but William Shakespeare, though notable figures including T. S. Eliot turned against him.

  William Blake considered Milton the major English poet and made him a spiritual guide in his Milton: A Poem in Two Books. Edmund Burke regarded Milton's description of Hell as exemplary of the sublime. William Wordsworth opened a sonnet with the line Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour and modelled his own blank-verse epic The Prelude on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton's style uncongenial, complaining of too many Miltonic inversions. Thomas Carlyle later called him the moral king of English literature.

  The reach extended past poetry into politics and music. The ideas of Milton, Locke, Sidney, and James Harrington shaped the Radical Whigs, whose ideology was central to the American Revolution, and Areopagitica is still cited as relevant to the First Amendment. Handel set L'Allegro and Il Penseroso in 1740, and Joseph Haydn drew on Paradise Lost for his oratorio The Creation in 1798. Philip Pullman took the title of His Dark Materials from line 915 of Book II, calling Milton our greatest public poet.