Milton, John (1608-1674)

English poet and prose writer. His epic Paradise Lost (1667) is one of the landmarks of English literature. Early poems, including Comus (a masque performed in 1634) and Lycidas (an elegy, 1638), showed Milton's outstanding lyric gift. He also wrote many pamphlets and prose works, including Areopagitica (1644), which opposed press censorship.

Born in Cheapside, London, and educated at St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge, Milton was a scholarly poet, ambitious to match the classical epics, and with strong theological views. He published prose works on republicanism and church government. His middle years were devoted to the Puritan cause and writing pamphlets, including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), which may have been based on his own experience of marital unhappiness. In 1643 Milton married Mary Powell, the 17-year-old daughter of an Oxfordshire cavalier. After an attempt to seek a divorce, she returned to Milton and three daughters were born of the marriage; they later became his somewhat unwilling scribes. In 1649 Milton's reputation as a Latinist led to his appointment as Latin secretary to the Council of State. During his time as secretary to the lord protector, Oliver Cromwell and the Council of State, Milton's assistants, as his sight failed, included English poet Andrew Marvell. In 1652 his wife died and four years later he married Katherine Woodcock; both she and their baby daughter died in childbirth in 1658. At the Restoration he was deprived of his office, and had to go into hiding; but on the intercession of Marvell, and perhaps English poet and dramatist William Davenant, his name was included in the amnesty. In 1663 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, aged 25, who appears to have given him domestic happiness in his last years. Paradise Lost and the less successful sequel Paradise Regained (1671) were written when he was blind and in some political danger (after the restoration of Charles II), as was the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes (1671). In addition to his blindness, Milton suffered from gout; his strength gradually declined. He died in 1674 and was buried in the chancel of St Giles, Cripplegate, London.

Milton's early poems have a baroque luxuriousness, a rich and sensuous use of imagery and cadence, while his later works are more sober, the blank verse more measured in its mixture of classical and English diction. His stated intention in writing Paradise Lost was to ‘assert eternal Providence/And justify the ways of God to men’. He does not so much imitate the classical epics as use their poetical conventions to demonstrate the supremacy of Christian revelation. In Lycidas, too, Christian values finally supplant the range of thought available to the classical elegists, and Samson Agonistes reinterprets the values of Greek tragedy.

Milton's earliest poem was ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’ (1626), following the death of his sister's first child. It was followed during his seven years at Cambridge by the poems ‘On the Morning of Christ's Nativity’ (1629), ‘On the Circumcision’, ‘The Passion’, ‘At a Solemn Music’, ‘On May Morning’, and ‘On Shakespeare’ (all 1630); and two sonnets, ‘To the Nightingale’ and ‘On Arriving at the Age of Twenty-three’ (1631).

From 1632 he lived for six years in Horton, near Windsor, engaged in further study. Here he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1632), Arcades (1633), Comus (1634), and Lycidas (1638). L'Allegro celebrates cheerful innocence and Il Penseroso contemplative, though not gloomy, retirement; Lycidas is a lament for a lost friend. Arcades and Comus are masques set to music by English composer Henry Lawes; their themes are, respectively, family affection and chastity. In 1638 Milton completed his education by travelling in France and Italy. News of the impending conflict in England between king and Parliament took him home the following year, and his return may be seen as closing the first of three well-marked divisions into which his life falls. These are, first, the period of preparation and of the early poems; second, the period of controversy and of the prose writings; and third, the period of retirement and of the later poems.

Soon after his return, Milton settled in London and began teaching his nephews, Edward and John Phillips, while deliberating on various subjects as the possible theme for the great poem which he looked forward to writing. Soon, however, he was plunged into the controversies and practical business which were to absorb his energies for the next 20 years. Deeply committed to the Puritan cause, his writings were directed to the ideals of religious and civil freedom. The works of this period fall into those directed against episcopacy (government by bishops), including Reformation of Church Discipline in England (1641), his answers to the writings of Bishop Hall and in defence of Smectymnuus; those relating to divorce, including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and The Four Chief Places of Scripture which Treat Marriage (1645); and those on political and miscellaneous questions, including the Tractate on Education (1644), Areopagitica, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (a passionate plea for press freedom, his greatest prose work), Eikonoklastes (1649) (an answer to the Eikon Basilike of Dr Gauden), The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) (in defence of the execution of Charles I), which led to the furious controversy with Salmasius and Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1650) and a second Defensio (1654), which carried his name across Europe, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, written on the eve of the Restoration.

The Restoration marked the beginning of Milton's third and most productive period. He was now free to devote his whole powers to the great work which he had so long contemplated. The result was Paradise Lost, which was begun in 1658, finished in 1664, and published in 1667. A remark of his friend, English author Thomas Ellwood, suggested to him the writing of Paradise Regained, which has as its theme Christ's temptation in the wilderness, while Samson Agonistes follows the biblical story of Samson from his captivity in Gaza to the destruction of the temple.

Milton's verse is not always the ‘organ voice’ for which he is notorious; it is a flexible medium, capable of great precision and subtlety. Nevertheless, it has been widely criticized in the 20th century, notably by US-born writer T S Eliot and English literary critic F R Leavis, partly for its ‘un-English’ elements and partly for its unfortunate influence on his less gifted successors.