John Milton

John Milton was born in Bread Street, London, in December 1608, the son of a prosperous scrivener who paid for an education calibrated to produce a major writer. St Paul's School, then Christ's College, Cambridge (BA 1629, MA 1632), then five further years of self-directed reading at his father's country house — Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, French, theology, music, the entirety of classical and patristic literature. In 1638–1639 he toured Italy, met Galileo under house arrest in Florence, and returned with a settled ambition to write something in English that would stand beside Homer and Virgil. The project would take him thirty years and survive the loss of his sight, the collapse of the political cause he served, and a near-execution.

The 1640s and 1650s diverted him into pamphlet warfare on the parliamentary, Independent, Puritan side — anti-episcopal tracts, then divorce treatises that scandalized respectable opinion by arguing that incompatibility of mind was sufficient grounds, then Areopagitica (1644), his great speech against pre-publication censorship. Areopagitica is one of the founding documents of the modern theory of free expression and was largely ignored at the time. After the execution of Charles I in January 1649, Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, writing the new republic's diplomatic correspondence in Latin and defending the regicide in Defensio pro Populo Anglicano (1651), read across Europe.

The work cost him his sight. He had been losing vision since the early 1640s, probably from glaucoma; by 1654 he was completely blind. He continued in office under Cromwell, dictating to amanuenses including the young Andrew Marvell. When Cromwell died in 1658 and the Republic collapsed, Milton kept publishing against the impending restoration. Charles II returned in May 1660. Milton went into hiding; his books were burned by the public hangman; he was arrested and briefly imprisoned. He escaped execution — by what combination of influential friends (Marvell among them) and political calculation is not entirely clear — and emerged blind, fined, politically defeated, and free to write poetry.

Paradise Lost was published in 1667 in ten books, revised to twelve in 1674. It is the great English epic: a blank-verse retelling of the fall of Satan and of man, which takes its imaginative weight from the fallen angel's refusal to submit ("Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n") and its theological argument from the painful demonstration that this refusal is wrong. Milton dictated it over years to whoever was at hand, composing in his head overnight. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed in 1671 — the latter a closet drama about a blind defeated hero who brings down the temple on his enemies, written by a blind defeated republican whose enemies were the restored court.

The complications run through the work. The republican who wrote Areopagitica against censorship served as a censor under Cromwell, reviewing the Mercurius Politicus newsbook. The defender of liberty defended a regime that conquered and dispossessed Ireland. His private theology, set down in De Doctrina Christiana (discovered in a Whitehall cupboard in 1823), was substantially heretical — anti-trinitarian, mortalist, tolerant of polygamy — and would have horrified the orthodox readers who took Paradise Lost as a monument of Christian orthodoxy. He married three times, treated his daughters as research assistants, and produced in Eve a portrait feminist critics from Mary Wollstonecraft onward have found difficult to forgive. He died in November 1674 and was buried in St Giles-without-Cripplegate, beside his father.