John Milton
1608–1674
Biography
John Milton was an English poet, pamphleteer and public servant, born in London in December 1608. He was educated at St Paul's School and at Christ's College, Cambridge. In his youth he wrote English and Latin verse, a masque called Comus, and Italian sonnets. The political crisis of the 1640s drew him into the arguments over church government and divorce, and then into the defence of Parliament during the civil war. After the execution of Charles I he served the Commonwealth as secretary for foreign tongues, and he wrote Latin pamphlets in its support.
His prose includes Areopagitica (1644), an attack on licensing books before they could be printed, which is still read as one of the great arguments for free expression. Milton went blind in the 1650s, but he kept working and dictated his greatest poems: Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, a blank-verse epic on the Fall of Adam and Eve, and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, both published in 1671. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 he lost his public role, and these late works reflect on the failure of the godly commonwealth he had served.
Two of his books are on this site. Milton: The Shorter Poems collects his shorter English poems, from early pastoral and lyric pieces such as L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Lycidas to his later sonnets. Paradise Lost, the epic that secured his reputation as a poet, is the other, and its blank verse became a model for English poets long after him.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Milton: The Shorter Poems
by John Milton
The shorter poems of Milton, from the twin pictures of mirth and melancholy in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso to the masque Comus, the elegy Lycidas and the sonnets 'On His Blindness' and 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont'. The Nativity ode is not in this text, because the editor's…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Paradise Lost
by John Milton
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The poem concerns the biblical story of the fall of man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The first version, published…
Summary from Wikipedia: Paradise Lost (CC BY-SA 4.0)