John Milton

John Milton
Born	9 December 1608(1608-12-09) Bread Street, Cheapside, London, England
Died	8 November 1674 (aged 65) Bunhill, London, England
Occupation	Poet, prose polemicist, civil servant
Notable work(s)	Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica
Influences Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Torquato Tasso, Petrarch,
Influenced John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Percy Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Golding

John Milton (9 December, 1608 – 8 November, 1674) was an English poet, prose, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, and for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica.

Milton was writing at a time of religious and political flux in England. His poetry and prose reflect deep convictions, often reacting to contemporary circumstances, but it is not always easy to locate the writer in any obvious religious category. His views may be described as broadly Protestant, and he was an accomplished man of letters and an official in the government of Oliver Cromwell.

Artistic licence and polemic may overshadow Milton's personal views, and assessments of Milton have varied greatly. Very soon after his death, Milton became the subject of partisan biographies. T. S. Eliot believed that

"of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions... making unlawful entry".^[1]

His radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; Samuel Johnson described him as "an acrimonious and surly republican."

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Family life and childhood 1.2 Cambridge years 1.3 Study and poetry 1632-1638 1.4 Travel 1.5 Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage 1.6 Secretary of Foreign Tongues 1.7 Milton and the Restoration 2 Published poetry 2.1 Paradise Lost 3 Milton's views 3.1 Philosophy 3.2 Political thought 3.3 Religion 3.4 Divorce 3.5 History 4 Legacy and influence 5 Poetic and dramatic works 6 Political, philosophical and religious prose 7 References 8 External links

Biography

The phases of Milton's life closely parallel the major historical divisions of Stuart Britain: the Caroline ancien régime, the Commonwealth of England and the Restoration. One can situate both his poetry and his politics historically. Both sprang from the philosophical and religious beliefs Milton developed from his reading and experience, from student days to the English Revolution.^[2]

By the time his death in 1674, Milton was blind, impoverished and yet unrepentant for his political choices. Milton had by then attained Europe-wide fame, and notoriety, for his radical political and religious beliefs, as well as his writings in English and Latin poetry.

Family life and childhood

John Milton's father, also named John Milton (1562 - 1647), moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father, Richard Milton, for embracing Protestantism. In London, Milton senior married Sarah Jeffrey (1572 - 1637), the poet's mother, and found lasting financial success as a scrivener (a profession that combined the functions of solicitor, realtor, public notary and moneylender), where he lived and worked out of a house on Bread Street, where the Mermaid Tavern was located.^[3] in Cheapside. The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a musical composer (his songs have recently been recorded), and this talent left Milton with a lifetime appreciation for music and friendship with musicians like Henry Lawes.^[4]

After Milton was born, on 9 December 1608, his father's prosperity provided his eldest son with a private tutor, Thomas Young, and then a place at St Paul's School in London. There he began the study of Latin and Greek, and the classical languages left an imprint on his poetry in English (he wrote also in Italian and Latin). His first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15 at Long Bennington.

One contemporary source is the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, a compilation of gossip, first-hand report and inaccurate information. According to Aubrey, the fledgling poet was remarkable for his work ethic: "When he was young", recalled Christopher, his younger brother, "he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night".^[5]

Cambridge years

John Milton matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1625 and graduated B.A. in 1629, ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year in the University of Cambridge.^[6] Preparing to become an Anglican priest, he stayed on to obtain his Master of Arts degree on 3 July 1632.

Milton was probably rusticated for quarrelling in his first year with his tutor, William Chappell. He was certainly at home in the Lent Term 1626; there he wrote his Elegia Prima, a first Latin elegy, to Carolo Diodati.^[7][8] Based on remarks of John Aubrey, Chappell "whipt" Milton.^[5] This story is now disputed. Certainly Milton disliked Chappell.^[9] Christopher Hill cautiously notes that Milton was "apparently" rusticated, and that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal, as far as we can know.^[10] Another factor, possibly, was the plague, by which Cambridge was badly affected in 1625. ^[11] Later in 1626 Milton's tutor was Nathaniel Tovey (1597-1658).

At Cambridge Milton was on good terms with Edward King, for whom he later wrote Lycidas. He also befriended Anglo-American dissident and theologian, Roger Williams. Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch.^[12] Otherwise at Cambridge he developed a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, but experienced alienation from his peers and university life as a whole. Watching his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage, he later observed that 'they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools'.^[13] Milton, due to his hair, which he wore long, and his general delicacy of manner, was known as the "Lady of Christ's".

The university curriculum worked towards formal debates on topics, conducted in Latin. Yet his corpus is not devoid of humour, notably his sixth prolusion and his epitaphs on the death of Thomas Hobson.^[14] While at Cambridge he wrote a number of his well-known shorter English poems, among them On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,^[15] his Epitaph on the admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare,^[16] his first poem to appear in print, L'Allegro^[17] and Il Penseroso.^[18]

Study and poetry 1632-1638

Upon receiving his M.A. in 1632, Milton retired to Hammersmith, his father's new home since the previous year. He also lived at Horton, from 1635, and undertook six years of self-directed private study. Christopher Hill points out that this was not retreat into a rural or pastoral idyll at all: Hammersmith was then a "suburban village" falling into the orbit of London, and that Horton was becoming deforested, and suffered from the plague.^[19]

He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature and science, in preparation for a prospective poetical career. Milton's intellectual development can be charted via entries in his commonplace book, now in the British Library. As a result of such intensive study, Milton is considered to be among the most learned of all English poets; in addition to his six years of private study, Milton had command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; he also added Old English to his linguistic repertoire in the 1650s while researching his History of Britain, and probably acquired proficiency in Dutch soon after.^[20]

Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study: his Arcades^[21] and Comus^[22] were both commissioned for masques composed for noble patrons, connections of the Egerton family, and performed in 1632 and 1634 respectively. He contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas^[23] to a memorial collection for one of his Cambridge classmates in 1638. Drafts of these poems are preserved in Milton’s poetry notebook, known as the Trinity Manuscript because it is now kept at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Travel

After completing his course of private study in early 1638, Milton embarked upon a tour of France and Italy in May of the same year that was cut short 13 months later by what he later termed ‘sad tidings of civil war in England.’^[24] The only major contemporary source for these travels is Milton's own Defensio Secunda of 1654, which is rhetorical as autobiography, and largely unverifiable in detail.^[25] Moving quickly through France, he met Hugo Grotius (whom later in Chapter XVII of the Discipline and Doctrine of Divorce he called a "man of general learning").^[26] Milton then sailed to Genoa, and quickly took in Pisa before he arrived in Florence around June, where he probably joined the Svogliati under Jacopo Gaddi.^[27] Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice were Milton’s primary stops on his lengthy Italian visit, during which his candor of manner and erudite neo-Latin poetry made him many friends in intellectual circles. Milton met a number of famous and influential people through these connections, ranging from the astronomer Galileo to the nobleman Giovanni Battista Manso, patron of Torquato Tasso, to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII. After some time spent in Venice and other northern Italian cities, Milton returned to England in July via Switzerland and France.

Overall in Italy, Milton rejoiced in discovering the intellectual community he had missed at Cambridge—he even altered his handwriting and pronunciation of Latin to make them more Italian. At the same time, his firsthand observation of what he viewed as the superstitious tyranny of Catholicism increased his hatred for absolutist confessional states.

Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage

Upon returning to England, where the Bishops' Wars suggested that armed conflict between King Charles and his parliamentary opponents was imminent, Milton put poetry aside and began to write prose tracts against episcopacy, in the service of the Puritan and Parliamentary cause. Milton’s first foray into polemics was Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England (1641), followed by Of Prelatical Episcopacy, the two defences of Smectymnuus (an organisation of Protestant divines named from their initials: the "TY" belonged to Milton's old tutor Thomas Young), and The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty. With frequent passages of real eloquence lighting up the rough controversial style of the period, and with a wide knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquity, he vigorously attacked the High-church party of the Church of England and their leader, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Though supported by his father’s investments, at this time Milton also became a private schoolmaster, educating his nephews and other children of the well-to-do. This experience, and discussions with educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, led him to write in 1644 his short tract, Of Education, urging a reform of the national universities.

In June 1642, Milton took a mysterious trip into the countryside and returned with a 16-year-old bride, Mary Powell. A month later, finding life difficult with the severe 33-year-old schoolmaster and pamphleteer, Mary returned to her family. Because of the outbreak of the Civil War, she did not return until 1645; in the meantime her desertion prompted Milton, over the next three years, to publish a series of pamphlets arguing for the legality and morality of divorce. It was the hostile response accorded the divorce tracts that spurred Milton to write Areopagitica, his celebrated attack on censorship.

Secretary of Foreign Tongues

With the parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended popular government and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton’s political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. Though Milton's main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin, he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor. In October 1649 he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defence of the regicide, in response to the Eikon Basilike, a phenomenal best-seller popularly attributed to Charles I that portrayed the King as an innocent Christian martyr.

A month after Milton had tried to break this powerful image of Charles I (the literal translation of Eikonklastes is 'the image breaker'), the exiled Charles II and his party published a defence of monarchy, Defensio Regia Pro Carolo Primo, written by one of Europe's most renowned orators and scholars, Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State. Given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, Milton worked much slower than usual, as he drew upon the vast array of learning marshalled throughout his years of study to compose a suitably withering riposte. On 24 February 1652 Milton published his Latin defence of the English People, Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano, also known as the First Defence. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning, exemplified in the First Defence, quickly made him the toast of all Europe. In 1654, in response to a Royalist tract, Regii sanguinis clamor, that made many personal attacks on Milton, he completed a second defence of the English nation, Defensio secunda, which praised Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander More, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor, published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. In addition to these literary defences of the Commonwealth and his character, Milton continued to translate official correspondence into Latin. The probable onset of glaucoma finally resulted in total blindness by 1654, forcing him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses, one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell.

After bearing him four children—Anne, Mary, John, and Deborah—Milton’s wife, Mary, died on 5 May 1652 from complications following Deborah's birth on 2 May. In June, John died at age 15 months; Milton’s daughters survived to adulthood, but he always had a strained relationship with them. On 12 November 1656, Milton remarried, this time to Katherine Woodcock. Her death on 3 February 1658, less than four months after giving birth to their daughter, Katherine, who also died, prompted one of Milton’s most moving sonnets.^[28]

Milton and the Restoration

Though Cromwell’s death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions, Milton stubbornly clung to the beliefs that had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth. In 1659 he published A Treatise of Civil Power, attacking the concept of a state church (known as Erastianism), as well as Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings, denouncing corrupt practises in church governance. As the Republic disintegrated Milton wrote several proposals to retain a non-monarchical government against the wishes of parliament, soldiers and the people:

• A Letter to a Friend, Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, written in October 1659, responsed to General Lambert's recent dissolution of the Rump Parliament
• Proposals of certain expedients for the preventing of a civil war now feared, written in November 1659
• The Ready and Easy Way to Establishing a Free Commonwealth, in two editions, responded to General Monck's march towards London to restore the Long Parliament (which eventually led to the restoration of the monarchy). The work is an impassioned, bitter, and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty and advocating the establishment of an authoritarian rule by an elitist, unelected parliament.

Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton went into hiding for his life as a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings burnt. Re-emerging after a general pardon was issued, he was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned before influential friends, such as Marvell, now an MP, intervened. On 24 February 1663 Milton remarried, for a third and final time, a Wistaston, Cheshire-born woman Elizabeth (Betty) Minshull, then aged 24, and spent the remaining decade of his life living quietly in London, with the exception of retiring to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles (his only extant home) during the Great Plague. Milton died of kidney failure on 8 November 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles Cripplegate; according to an early biographer, his funeral was attended by “his learned and great Friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the Vulgar.”^[29]

Published poetry

Milton's poetry was slow to see the light of day, at least under his name. His first published poem was On Shakespear (1630), anonymously included in the second folio edition of Shakespeare.^[30] In the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government, Milton published his 1645 Poems. Leaving aside the anonymous edition of Comus in 1637, this was the only poetry of his to see print, until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.

Paradise Lost

Main article: Paradise Lost

Milton’s magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, which appeared in a quarto edition in 1667, was composed by the blind Milton from 1658-1664 through dictation given to a series of aides in his employ. It reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution, yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the “Good Old Cause.”^[31] Though Milton notoriously sold the copyright of this monumental work to his publisher for a seemingly trifling £10, this was not a particularly outlandish deal at the time.^[32] Milton followed up Paradise Lost with its sequel, Paradise Regained, published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Both these works also resonate with Milton’s post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised the release of a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of “why the poem rhymes not” and prefatory verses by Marvell. Milton republished his 1645 Poems in 1673, as well a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days. A 1668 edition of Paradise Lost, reported to have been Milton's personal copy, is now housed in the archives of the University of Western Ontario.

In 1974, surrealist artist Salvador Dali illustrated Milton's Paradise Lost. As of July 2008, examples from this series can be viewed at the William Bennett Gallery in Manhattan.^[33]

During the Restoration Milton also published several minor prose works, such as a grammar textbook, his Art of Logic, and his History of Britain. His only explicitly political tracts were the 1672 Of True Religion, arguing for toleration (except for Catholics), and a translation of a Polish tract advocating an elective monarchy. Both these works participated in the Exclusion debate that would preoccupy politics in the 1670s and '80s and precipitate the formation of the Whig party and the Glorious Revolution. Milton's unfinished religious manifesto, De doctrina christiana, in which he laid out many of his heretical views, was not discovered and published until 1823.

Milton's views

Milton's idiosyncratic beliefs stemmed from the Puritan emphasis on the centrality and inviolability of conscience.^[34] In all of his strongly held opinions, Milton can generally be called a "party of one" for going well beyond the orthodoxy of the time. He is in no sense a representative thinker of his time, across a range of issues where he was his own man: it is, though, one of his less original and more representative positions, in Areopagitica, where he was anticipated by Henry Robinson and others, that has lasted best of his works as engaged intellectual. His thinking on divorce caused him the most trouble with the authorities.

Philosophy

By the late 1650s, Milton was a proponent of monism or animist materialism, the notion that a single material substance which is "animate, self-active, and free" composes everything in the universe: from stones and trees and bodies to minds, souls, angels, and God.^[35] Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. Milton's monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat (5.433-39) and engage in sexual intercourse (8.622-29) and the De Doctrina, where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo.

Political thought

In his political writing, Milton addressed particular themes at different periods. The years 1641-42 were dedicated to church politics and the struggle against episcopacy. After his divorce writings, Areopagitica, and a gap, he wrote in 1649-54 in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, and in polemic justification of the regicide and the existing Parliamentarian regime. Then in 1659-60 he foresaw the Restoration, and wrote to head it off.^[36]

Milton's own beliefs were in some cases both unpopular and dangerous, and this was true particularly to his commitment to republicanism. In coming centuries, Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism.^[37] According to James Tully:

“

... with Locke as with Milton, republican and contraction conceptions of political freedom join hands in common opposition to the disengaged and passive subjection offered by absolutists such as Hobbes and Robert Filmer.[38]

”

A friend and ally in the pamphlet wars was Marchamont Nedham. Austin Woolrych considers that although they were quite close, there is "little real affinity, beyond a broad republicanism", between their approaches.^[39] Blair Worden remarks that both Milton and Nedham, with others such as Andrew Marvell and James Harrington, would have taken the problem with the Rump Parliament to be not the republic, but the fact that it was not a proper republic.^[40] Woolrych speaks of "the gulf between Milton's vision of the Commonwealth's future and the reality".^[41] In the early version of his History of Britain, begun in 1649, Milton was already writing off the members of the Long Parliament as incorrigible.^[42]

He praised Oliver Cromwell as the Protectorate was set up; though subsequently he had major reservations. When Cromwell seemed to be backsliding as a revolutionary, after a couple of years in power, Milton moved closer to the position of Sir Henry Vane, to whom he wrote a sonnet in 1652.^[43][44] The group of disaffected republicans included, besides Vane, John Bradshaw, John Hutchinson, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Marten, Robert Overton, Edward Sexby and John Streater; but not Marvell, who remained with Cromwell's party.^[45] Milton had already commended Overton, along with Edmund Whalley and Bulstrode Whitelocke, in Defensio Secunda.^[46]

As Richard Cromwell fell from power, he envisaged a step towards a freer republic or “free commonwealth”, writing in the hope of this outcome in early 1660. Milton had argued for an awkward position, in the Ready and Easy Way, because he wanted to invoke the Good Old Cause and gain the support of the republicans, but without offering a democratic solution of any kind.^[47] This attitude also cut right across the grain of popular opinion of the time, which swung decisively behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy that took place later in the year.^[48] Milton, an associate of and advocate on behalf of the regicides, was silenced on political matters as Charles II returned.

Religion

Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views. He rejected the Trinity, in the belief that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his sympathy was probably with Socinianism (precursor to modern-day Unitarianism), which held that Jesus was not divine.

Illustrated by Paradise Lost is mortalism, the belief that the soul lies dormant after the body dies.^[49] Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimize divorce after 1645, but he expressed support for polygamy in the De doctrina christiana, the unpublished theological treatise that provides evidence for his heretical views. ^[50]

Like many Renaissance artists before him, Milton attempted to integrate Christian theology with classical modes. In his early poems, the poet narrator express a tension between vice and virtue, the latter invariably related to Protestantism. In Comus Milton may make ironic use of the Caroline court masque by elevating notions of purity and virtue over the conventions of court revelry and superstition. In his later poems, Milton's theological concerns become more explicit.

In his 1641 treatise, Of Reformation, Milton expressed his dislike for Catholicism and episcopacy, presenting Rome as a modern Babylon, and bishops as Egyptian taskmasters. These analogies conform to Milton's puritanical preference for Old Testament imagery. Through the Interregnum, Milton often presents England, rescued from the trappings of a worldly monarchy, as an elect nation akin to the Old Testament Israel, and shows its leader, Oliver Cromwell, as a latter-day Moses. These views were bound up in Protestant views of the Millennium, which some sects, such as the Fifth Monarchists predicted would arrive in England.

The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 began a new phase in Milton's work. In Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes Milton mourns the end of the godly Commonwealth. The Garden of Eden may allegorically reflect Milton's view of England's recent Fall from Grace, while Samson's blindness and captivity – mirroring Milton's own lost sight – may be a metaphor for England's blind acceptance of Charles II as king.

Despite the Restoration of the monarchy Milton did not lose his personal faith; Samson shows how the loss of national salvation did not necessarily preclude the salvation of the individual, while Paradise Regained expresses Milton's continuing belief in the promise of Christian salvation through Jesus Christ.

Though he may have maintained his personal faith in spite of the defeats suffered by his cause, the Dictionary of National Biography recounts how he had been alienated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud, and then moved similarly from the Dissenters by their denunciation of religious tolerance in England.

"Milton had come to stand apart from all sects, though apparently finding the Quakers most congenial. He never went to any religious services in his later years. When a servant brought back accounts of sermons from nonconformist meetings, Milton became so sarcastic that the man at last gave up his place".

Divorce

Main article: Milton's divorce tracts

An orthodox view of the time was that Milton's views on divorce constituted a one-man heresy:

“

The fervently Presbyterian Edwards had included Milton’s divorce tracts in his list in Gangraena of heretical publications that threatened the religious and moral fabric of the nation; Milton responded by mocking him as “shallow Edwards” in the satirical sonnet “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” usually dated to the latter half of 1646.[51]

”

Even here, though, his originality is qualified: Thomas Gataker had already identified "mutual solace" as a principal goal in marriage.^[52]

History

History was particularly important for the political class of the period, and Lewalski considers that Milton "more than most illustrates" a remark of Thomas Hobbes on the weight placed at the time on the classical Latin historical writers Tacitus, Livy, Sallust and Cicero, and their republican attitudes.^[53] Milton himself wrote that "Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters", in Book II of his History of Britain. A sense of history mattered greatly to him:

“

The course of human history, the immediate impact of the civil disorders, and his own traumatic personal life, are all regarded by Milton as typical of the predicament he describes as 'the misery that has bin since Adam'.[54]

”

Legacy and influence

Milton's literary career cast a formidable shadow over English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries; he was often judged equal or superior to all other English poets, including Shakespeare. John Dryden, an early enthusiast, in 1677 began the trend of describing Milton as the poet of the sublime.^[55] It is possible to observe Lucy Hutchinson's epic poem about the fall of Humanity, Order and Disorder (1679), as well as Dryden's The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man: an Opera (1677), as evidence of an immediate cultural influence.

The influence of Milton's poetry and personality on the literature of the Romantic era was partly ironic. The Romantic poets valued his exploration of blank verse, but for the most part rejected his religiosity. William Wordsworth began his sonnet "London, 1802" with "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour"^[56] and modeled The Prelude, his own blank verse epic, on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton's style debilitating.; he exclaimed that "Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour."^[57] Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a "beautiful and grand curiosity," but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry, Hyperion, is said to have suffered from Keats's failed attempt to cultivate a distinct epic voice.. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein draws heavily on Paradise Lost.: The relationship between the Creature and Frankenstein in Shelley's horror classic reflects the relationship between God and Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost.

The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton's influence; George Eliot^[58] and Thomas Hardy being particularly inspired by Milton's poetry and biography. By contrast, the early 20th century, owing to the critical efforts of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, witnessed a reduction in Milton's stature.

Milton coined many words that are now familiar; in Paradise Lost readers were confronted by neologisms like dreary, pandæmonium, acclaim, rebuff, self-esteem, unaided, impassive, enslaved, jubilant, serried, solaced, and satanic.

In the political arena, Milton's Areopagitica and republican writings were consulted during the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America. A quotation from Areopagitica – "A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life" – is displayed in many public libraries, including the New York Public Library.

The John Milton Society for the Blind was founded in 1928 by Helen Keller to develop an interdenominational ministry that would bring spiritual guidance and religious literature to deaf and blind persons.

John Milton's Paradise Lost is also the inspiration for Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials; indeed, the name of the trilogy is derived from a quotation.

Poetic and dramatic works

• L'Allegro (1631)
• Il Penseroso (1631)
• Comus (a masque)(1634)
• Lycidas (1638)
• Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645)
• Paradise Lost (1667)
• Paradise Regained (1671)
• Samson Agonistes (1671)
• Poems, &c, Upon Several Occasions (1673)

Political, philosophical and religious prose

• Of Reformation (1641)
• Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641)
• Animadversions (1641)
• The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty (1642)
• Apology for Smectymnuus (1642)
• Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643)
• Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644)
• Of Education (1644)
• Areopagitica (1644)
• Tetrachordon (1645)
• Colasterion (1645)
• The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)
• Eikonoklastes (1649)
• Defensio pro Populo Anglicano [First Defense] (1651)
• Defensio Secunda [Second Defense] (1654)
• A treatise of Civil Power (1659)
• The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings from the Church (1659)
• The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660)
• Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon (1660)
• Accedence Commenced Grammar (1669)
• History of Britain (1670)
• Artis logicae plenior institutio [Art of Logic] (1672)
• Of True Religion (1673)
• Epistolae Familiaries (1674)
• Prolusiones (1674)
• A brief History of Moscovia, and other less known Countries lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gathered from the writings of several Eye-witnesses (1682) [1]
• De Doctrina Christiana (1823)

References

External links

• Works by John Milton at Project Gutenberg
• Milton Reading Room – online, almost fully annotated, collection of all of Milton's poetry and selections of his prose
• Milton-L Homepage - A scholarly website devoted to the life, literature and times of Milton. It hosts the webpage for the Milton Society of America, as well as the Milton listserv, an Internet discussion group for Milton.
• Milton index entry at Poets' Corner
• Milton 400th Anniversary – lots of Milton material and details of the Milton 400th Anniversary Celebrations, from Christ's College, Cambridge, where Milton studied
• "Milton and De Doctrina Christiana" by Gordon Campbell et al., 1996
• "The masque in Milton's Arcades and Comus" by Gilbert McInnis
• History of the John Milton Society for the Blind in Canada
• How Milton Works by Stanley Fish
• Milton's cottage
• Paradise Lost by John Milton, Introduction and Notes by David Hawkes
• A common-place book of John Milton, and a Latin essay and Latin verses presumed to be by Milton Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections
• "John Milton-poet or politician?" on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, featuring John Carey, Lisa Jardine, Blair Worden
• Famous Quotes by John Milton
• Milton's Paradise: exhibit review: marking the poet's 400th 2008 ArtsEditor.com article
• Site dedicated to Milton
• Books on Milton's life and works
• Librivox recording of Areopagitica(mp3/ogg)
• Librivox recording of Paradise Lost(mp3/ogg)

Persondata
NAME	Milton, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English poet and prose polemicist
DATE OF BIRTH	9 December 1608(1608-12-09)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bread Street, Cheapside, London
DATE OF DEATH	8 November 1674
PLACE OF DEATH	Bunhill, London