Milton John

John Milton,  (born December 9, 1608, London, England—died November 8?, 1674, London?), English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, considered the most significant English author after William Shakespeare.

Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, it confirms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his prose works Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. From the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642 to long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he espoused in all his works a political philosophy that opposed tyranny and state-sanctioned religion. His influence extended not only through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French revolutions. In his works on theology, he valued liberty of conscience, the paramount importance of Scripture as a guide in matters of faith, and religious toleration toward dissidents. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 through his handling of its international correspondence and his defense of the government against polemical attacks from abroad.

Milton’s paternal grandfather, Richard, was a staunch Roman Catholic who expelled his son John, the poet’s father, from the family home in Oxfordshire for reading an English (i.e., Protestant) Bible. Banished and disinherited, Milton’s father established in London a business as a scrivener, preparing documents for legal transactions. He was also a moneylender, and he negotiated with creditors to arrange for loans on behalf of his clients. He and his wife, Sara Jeffrey, whose father was a merchant tailor, had three children who survived their early years: Anne, the oldest, followed by John and Christopher. Though Christopher became a lawyer, a Royalist, and perhaps a Roman Catholic, he maintained throughout his life a cordial relationship with his older brother. After the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Christopher, among others, may have interceded to prevent the execution of his brother.

The elder John Milton, who fostered cultural interests as a musician and composer, enrolled his son John at St. Paul’s School, probably in 1620, and employed tutors to supplement his son’s formal education. Milton was privately tutored by Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian who may have influenced his gifted student in religion and politics while they maintained contact across subsequent decades. At St. Paul’s Milton befriended Charles Diodati, a fellow student who would become his confidant through young adulthood. During his early years, Milton may have heard sermons by the poet John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was within view of his school. Educated in Latin and Greek there, Milton in due course acquired proficiency in other languages, especially Italian, in which he composed some sonnets and which he spoke as proficiently as a native Italian, according to the testimony of Florentines whom he befriended during his travel abroad in 1638–39.

Milton enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625, presumably to be educated for the ministry. A year later he was “rusticated,” or temporarily expelled, for a period of time because of a conflict with one of his tutors, the logician William Chappell. He was later reinstated under another tutor, Nathaniel Tovey. In 1629 Milton was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1632 he received a Master of Arts degree. Despite his initial intent to enter the ministry, Milton did not do so, a situation that has not been fully explained. Possible reasons are that Milton lacked respect for his fellow students who were planning to become ministers but whom he considered ill-equipped academically or that his Puritan inclinations, which became more radical as he matured, caused him to dislike the hierarchy of the established church and its insistence on uniformity of worship; perhaps, too, his self-evident disaffection impelled the Church of England to reject him for the ministry.

Overall, Milton was displeased with Cambridge, possibly because study there emphasized Scholasticism, which he found stultifying to the imagination. Moreover, in correspondence with a former tutor at St. Paul’s School, Alexander Gill, Milton complained about a lack of friendship with fellow students. They called him the “Lady of Christ’s College,” perhaps because of his fair complexion, delicate features, and auburn hair. Nonetheless, Milton excelled academically. At Cambridge he composed several academic exercises called prolusions, which were presented as oratorical performances in the manner of a debate. In such exercises, students applied their learning in logic and rhetoric, among other disciplines. Milton authorized publication of seven of his prolusions, composed and recited in Latin, in 1674, the year of his death.

In 1632, after seven years at Cambridge, Milton returned to his family home, now in Hammersmith, on the outskirts of London. Three years later, perhaps because of an outbreak of the plague, the family relocated to a more pastoral setting, Horton, in Buckinghamshire. In these two locations, Milton spent approximately six years in studious retirement, during which he read Greek and Latin authors chiefly. Without gainful employment, Milton was supported by his father during this period.

Milton, John [Credit: © Photos.com/Thinkstock]In 1638, accompanied by a manservant, Milton undertook a tour of the Continent for about 15 months, most of which he spent in Italy, primarily Rome and Florence. The Florentine academies especially appealed to Milton, and he befriended young members of the Italian literati, whose similar humanistic interests he found gratifying. Invigorated by their admiration for him, he corresponded with his Italian friends after his return to England, though he never saw them again. While in Florence, Milton also met with Galileo, who was under virtual house arrest. The circumstances of this extraordinary meeting, whereby a young Englishman about 30 years old gained access to the aged and blind astronomer, are unknown. (Galileo would become the only contemporary whom Milton mentioned by name in Paradise Lost.) While in Italy, Milton learned of the death in 1638 of Charles Diodati, his closest boyhood companion from St. Paul’s School, possibly a victim of the plague; he also learned of impending civil war in England, news that caused him to return home sooner than anticipated. Back in England, Milton took up residence in London, not far from Bread Street, where he had been born. In his household were John and Edward Phillips—sons of his sister, Anne—whom he tutored. Upon his return he composed an elegy in Latin, “Epitaphium Damonis” (“Damon’s Epitaph”), which commemorated Diodati.

By the time he returned to England in 1639, Milton had manifested remarkable talent as a linguist and translator and extraordinary versatility as a poet. While at St. Paul’s, as a 15-year-old student, Milton had translated Psalm 114 from the original Hebrew, a text that recounts the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. This translation into English was a poetic paraphrase in heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter), and later he translated and paraphrased the same psalm into Greek. Beginning such work early in his boyhood, he continued it into adulthood, especially from 1648 to 1653, a period when he was also composing pamphlets against the Church of England and the monarchy. Also in his early youth Milton composed letters in Latin verse. These letters, which range over many topics, are called elegies because they employ elegiac metre—a verse form, Classical in origin, that consists of couplets, the first line dactylic hexameter, the second dactylic pentameter. Milton’s first elegy, “Elegia prima ad Carolum Diodatum,” was a letter to Diodati, who was a student at Oxford while Milton attended Cambridge. But Milton’s letter was written from London in 1626, during his period of rustication; in the poem he anticipates his reinstatement, when he will “go back to the reedy fens of the Cam and return again to the hum of the noisy school.”

Another early poem in Latin is “In Quintum Novembris” (“On the Fifth of November”), which Milton composed in 1626 at Cambridge. The poem celebrates the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes was discovered preparing to detonate explosives at the opening of Parliament, an event in which King James I and his family would participate. On the event’s anniversary, university students typically composed poems that attacked Roman Catholics for their involvement in treachery of this kind. The papacy and the Catholic nations on the Continent also came under attack. Milton’s poem includes two larger themes that would later inform Paradise Lost: that the evil perpetrated by sinful humankind may be counteracted by Providence and that God will bring greater goodness out of evil. Throughout his career, Milton inveighed against Catholicism, though during his travels in Italy in 1638–39 he developed cordial personal relationships with Catholics, including high-ranking officials who oversaw the library at the Vatican.

In 1628 Milton composed an occasional poem, “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,” which mourns the loss of his niece Anne, the daughter of his older sister. Milton tenderly commemorates the child, who was two years old. The poem’s conceits, Classical allusions, and theological overtones emphasize that the child entered the supernal realm because the human condition, having been enlightened by her brief presence, was ill-suited to bear her any longer.

In this early period, Milton’s principal poems included “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” and the so-called companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Milton’s sixth elegy (“Elegia sexta”), a verse letter in Latin sent to Diodati in December 1629, provides valuable insight into his conception of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Informing Diodati of his literary activity, Milton recounts that he is singing the heaven-descended King, the bringer of peace, and the blessed times promised in the sacred books—the infant cries of our God and his stabling under a mean roof who, with his Father, governs the realms above.

The advent of the Christ child, he continues, results in the pagan gods being “destroyed in their own shrines.” In effect, Milton likens Christ to the source of light that, by dispelling the darkness of paganism, initiates the onset of Christianity and silences the pagan oracles. Milton’s summary in the sixth elegy makes clear his central argument in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: that the Godhead’s descent and humiliation is crucial to the Christ child’s triumph. Through this exercise of humility, the Godhead on behalf of humankind becomes victorious over the powers of death and darkness.

“On Shakespeare,” though composed in 1630, first appeared anonymously as one of the many encomiums in the Second Folio (1632) of Shakespeare’s plays. It was Milton’s first published poem in English. In the 16-line epigram Milton contends that no man-made monument is a suitable tribute to Shakespeare’s achievement. According to Milton, Shakespeare himself created the most enduring monument to befit his genius: the readers of the plays, who, transfixed with awe and wonder, become living monuments, a process renewed at each generation through the panorama of time. “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” written about 1631, may reflect the dialectic that informed the prolusions that Milton composed at Cambridge. The former celebrates the activities of daytime, and the latter muses on the sights, sounds, and emotions associated with darkness. The former describes a lively and sanguine personality, whereas the latter dwells on a pensive, even melancholic, temperament. In their complementary interaction, the poems may dramatize how a wholesome personality blends aspects of mirth and melancholy. Some commentators suggest that Milton may be allegorically portraying his own personality in “Il Penseroso” and Diodati’s more outgoing and carefree disposition in “L’Allegro.” If such is the case, then in their friendship Diodati provided the balance that offset Milton’s marked temperament of studious retirement.

Milton’s most important early poems, Comus and “Lycidas,” are major literary achievements, to the extent that his reputation as an author would have been secure by 1640 even without his later works. Comus, a dramatic entertainment, or masque, is also called A Mask; it was first published as A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle in 1638, but, since the late 17th century, it has typically been called by the name of its most vivid character, the villainous Comus. Performed in 1634 on Michaelmas (September 29) at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, Comus celebrates the installation of John Egerton, earl of Bridgewater and Viscount Brackley and a member of Charles I’s Privy Council, as lord president of Wales. In addition to various English and Welsh dignitaries, the installation was attended by Egerton’s wife and children; the latter—Alice (15 years old), John (11), and Thomas (9)—all had parts in the dramatic entertainment. Other characters include Thyrsis, an attendant spirit to the children; Sabrina, a nymph of the River Severn; and Comus, a necromancer and seducer. Henry Lawes, who played the part of Thyrsis, was a musician and composer, the music teacher of the Egerton children, and the composer of the music for the songs of Comus. Presumably Lawes invited Milton to write the masque, which not only consists of songs and dialogue but also features dances, scenery, and stage properties.

The masque develops the theme of a journey through the woods by the three Egerton children, in the course of which the daughter, called “the Lady,” is separated from her brothers. While alone, she encounters Comus, who is disguised as a villager and who claims that he will lead her to her brothers. Deceived by his amiable countenance, the Lady follows him, only to be victimized by his necromancy. Seated on an enchanted chair, she is immobilized, and Comus accosts her while with one hand he holds a necromancer’s wand and with the other he offers a vessel with a drink that would overpower her. Within view at his palace is an array of cuisine intended to arouse the Lady’s appetites and desires. Despite being restrained against her will, she continues to exercise right reason (recta ratio) in her disputation with Comus, thereby manifesting her freedom of mind. Whereas the would-be seducer argues that appetites and desires issuing from one’s nature are “natural” and therefore licit, the Lady contends that only rational self-control is enlightened and virtuous. To be self-indulgent and intemperate, she adds, is to forfeit one’s higher nature and to yield to baser impulses. In this debate the Lady and Comus signify, respectively, soul and body, ratio and libido, sublimation and sensualism, virtue and vice, moral rectitude and immoral depravity. In line with the theme of the journey that distinguishes Comus, the Lady has been deceived by the guile of a treacherous character, temporarily waylaid, and besieged by sophistry that is disguised as wisdom. As she continues to assert her freedom of mind and to exercise her free will by resistance, even defiance, she is rescued by the attendant spirit and her brothers. Ultimately, she and her brothers are reunited with their parents in a triumphal celebration, which signifies the heavenly bliss awaiting the wayfaring soul that prevails over trials and travails, whether these are the threats posed by overt evil or the blandishments of temptation.

Late in 1637 Milton composed a pastoral elegy called “Lycidas,” which commemorates the death of a fellow student at Cambridge, Edward King, who drowned while crossing the Irish Sea. Published in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago (“Obsequies in Memory of Edward King”), a compilation of elegies by Cambridge students, “Lycidas” is one of several poems in English, whereas most of the others are in Greek and Latin. As a pastoral elegy—often considered the most outstanding example of the genre—Milton’s poem is richly allegorical. King is called Lycidas, a shepherd’s name that recurs in Classical elegies. By choosing this name, Milton signals his participation in the tradition of memorializing a loved one through pastoral poetry, a practice that may be traced from ancient Greek Sicily through Roman culture and into the Christian Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The poem’s speaker, a persona for Milton’s own voice, is a fellow shepherd who mourns the loss of a friend with whom he shared duties in tending sheep. The pastoral allegory of the poem conveys that King and Milton were colleagues whose studious interests and academic activities were similar. In the course of commemorating King, the speaker challenges divine justice obliquely. Through allegory, the speaker accuses God of unjustly punishing the young, selfless King, whose premature death ended a career that would have unfolded in stark contrast to the majority of the ministers and bishops of the Church of England, whom the speaker condemns as depraved, materialistic, and selfish.

Informing the poem is satire of the episcopacy and ministry, which Milton heightens through invective and the use of odious metaphors, thereby anticipating his later diatribes against the Church of England in the antiprelatical tracts of the 1640s. Likening bishops to vermin infesting sheep and consuming their innards, Milton depicts the prelates in stark contrast to the ideal of the Good Shepherd that is recounted in the Gospel According to John. In this context, the speaker weighs the worldly success of the prelates and ministers against King’s death by drowning. The imagery of the poem depicts King being resurrected in a process of lustration from the waters in which he was immersed. Burnished by the sun’s rays at dawn, King resplendently ascends heavenward to his eternal reward. The prelates and ministers, though prospering on earth, will encounter St. Peter in the afterlife, who will smite them in an act of retributive justice. Though Milton dwells on King’s vocation as a minister, he also acknowledges that his Cambridge colleague was a poet whose death prevented him from establishing a literary reputation. Many commentators suggest that, in King, Milton created an alter ego, with King’s premature death reminding Milton that the vicissitudes of fate can interrupt long-standing aspirations and deny the fulfillment of one’s talents, whether ministerial or poetic.

Having returned from abroad in 1639, Milton turned his attention from poetry to prose. In doing so, he entered the controversies surrounding the abolition of the Church of England and of the Royalist government, at times replying to, and often attacking vehemently, English and Continental polemicists who targeted him as the apologist of radical religious and political dissent. In 1641–42 Milton composed five tracts on the reformation of church government. One of these tracts, Of Reformation, examines the historical changes in the Church of England since its inception under King Henry VIII and criticizes the continuing resemblances between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, especially the hierarchy in ecclesiastical government. In this tract and others, Milton also calls attention to resemblances between the ecclesiastical and political hierarchies in England, suggesting that the monarchical civil government influences the similar structure of the church. He likewise decries the unduly complicated arguments of theologians, whereas he praises the simplicity and clarity of Scripture.

In another tract from this period, The Reason of Church Government, Milton appears to endorse Scottish Presbyterianism as a replacement for the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England. A few years thereafter, he came to realize that Presbyterianism could be as inflexible as the Church of England in matters of theology, and he became more independent from established religion of all kinds, arguing for the primacy of Scripture and for the conscience of each believer as the guide to interpretation. In another tract from the period 1641–42, An Apology Against a Pamphlet, Milton verges on autobiography as he refutes scurrilous allegations attributed to Bishop Joseph Hall.

Soon after these controversies, Milton became embroiled in another conflict, one in his domestic life. Having married Mary Powell in 1642, Milton was a few months afterward deserted by his wife, who returned to her family’s residence in Oxfordshire. The reason for their separation is unknown, though perhaps Mary adhered to the Royalist inclinations of her family whereas her husband was progressively anti-Royalist. Or perhaps the discrepancy in their ages—he was 34, she was 17—led to a lack of mutual understanding. During her absence of approximately three years, Milton may have been planning marriage to another woman. But after Mary’s return, she and Milton evidently overcame the causes of their estrangement. Three daughters (Anne, Mary, and Deborah) were born, but a son, John, died at age one. Milton’s wife died in 1652 after giving birth to Deborah.

During his domestic strife and after his wife’s desertion, Milton probably began to frame the arguments of four prose tracts: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, enlarged 2nd ed. 1644), The Judgment of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644), Tetrachordon (1645), and Colasterion (1645). Whether or not his personal experience with Mary affected his views on marriage, Milton mounts a cogent, radical argument for divorce, an argument informed by the concepts of personal liberty and individual volition, the latter being instrumental in maintaining or ending a marriage. For Milton, marriage depends on the compatibility of the partners, and to maintain a marriage that is without mutual love and sympathy violates one’s personal liberty. In such circumstances, the marriage has already ceased. In his later divorce tracts, Milton buttresses his arguments with citations of scholars, such as the 16th-century reformer Martin Bucer, and with biblical passages that he marshals as proof texts.

About the time that the first and second editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce appeared, Milton published Of Education (1644). In line with the ideal of the Renaissance gentleman, Milton outlines a curriculum emphasizing the Greek and Latin languages not merely in and of themselves but as the means to learn directly the wisdom of Classical antiquity in literature, philosophy, and politics. The curriculum, which mirrors Milton’s own education at St. Paul’s, is intended to equip a gentleman to perform “all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” Aimed at the nobility, not commoners, Milton’s plan does not include public education. Nor does it include a university education, possible evidence of Milton’s dissatisfaction with Cambridge.

The most renowned tract by Milton is Areopagitica (1644), which opposes governmental licensing of publications or procedures of censorship. Milton contends that governments insisting on the expression of uniform beliefs are tyrannical. In his tract, he investigates historical examples of censorship, which, he argues, invariably emanate from repressive governments. The aim of Areopagitica, he explains, is to promote knowledge, test experience, and strive for the truth without any hindrances. Milton composed it after the manner of a Classical oration of the same title by Isocrates, directed to the Areopagus, or Athenian council. Informed by Milton’s knowledge of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and of orations by Demosthenes and Cicero, Areopagitica is a product of the very kind of learning that Milton advocates in Of Education. It is ultimately a fierce, passionate defense of the freedom of speech:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are…. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Counterbalancing the antiprelatical tracts of 1641–42 are the antimonarchical polemics of 1649–55. Composed after Milton had become allied to those who sought to form an English republic, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)—probably written before and during the trial of King Charles I though not published until after his death on January 30, 1649—urges the abolition of tyrannical kingship and the execution of tyrants. The treatise cites a range of authorities from Classical antiquity, Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, political philosophers of the early modern era, and Reformation theologians, all of whom support such extreme—but just, according to Milton—measures to punish tyrants. Thereafter, Milton was appointed secretary for foreign tongues (also called Latin secretary) for the Council of State, the executive body of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Milton was entrusted with the duties of translating foreign correspondence, drafting replies, composing papers in which national and international affairs of state were addressed, and serving as an apologist for the Commonwealth against attacks from abroad.

In this role as an apologist, Milton received the Council of State’s assignment to refute Eikon Basilike (“Image of the King”), which was published in 1649 within days of the king’s beheading. Subtitled The True Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, Eikon Basilike portrays the late king as pious, contemplative, caring toward his subjects, and gentle toward his family. Though putatively a personal account by Charles himself, the work was written by one of his supporters, Bishop John Gauden, and was very effective in arousing sympathy in England and on the Continent for the king, whom some perceived as a martyr. In his rebuttal, Eikonoklastes (1649; “Image-Breaker”), Milton shatters the image of the king projected in Eikon Basilike. Accusing Charles of hypocrisy, Milton cites Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard, duke of Gloucester, in Richard III as an analogue that drives home how treachery is disguised by the pretense of piety.

Soon afterward, Milton participated in major controversies against two polemicists on the Continent: Claudius Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise), a Frenchman, and Alexander More (Morus), who was Scottish-French. Charles II, while living in exile in France, is thought to have enlisted Salmasius to compose a Latin tract intended for a Continental audience that would indict the Englishmen who tried and executed Charles I. Universally acknowledged as a reputable scholar, Salmasius posed a formidable challenge to Milton, whose task was to refute his argument. Often imbued with personal invective, Milton’s Defense of the English People Against Salmasius (1651), a Latin tract, fastens on inconsistencies in Salmasius’s argument. Milton echoes much of what he had propounded in earlier tracts: that the execution of a monarch is supported by authorities from Classical antiquity to the early modern era and that public necessity and the tyrannical nature of Charles I’s sovereignty justified his death.

In 1652 an anonymous Continental author published another Latin polemic, The Cry of the King’s Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides. Milton’s refutation in Latin, The Second Defense of the English People by John Milton, Englishman, in Reply to an Infamous Book Entitled “Cry of the King’s Blood” (1654), contains many autobiographical passages intended to counteract the polemic’s vitriolic attacks on his personal life. Milton also mounts an eloquent, idealistic, and impassioned defense of English patriotism and liberty while he extols the leaders of the Commonwealth. The most poignant passages, however, are reserved for himself. Soon after the publication of Defense of the English People, Milton had become totally blind, probably from glaucoma. The Cry of the King’s Blood asserts that Milton’s blindness is God’s means of punishing him for his sins. Milton, however, replies that his blindness is a trial that has been visited upon him, an affliction that he is enduring under the approval of the Lord, who has granted him, in turn, special inner illumination, a gift that distinguishes him from others.

Three extraordinary prose works highlight the depth of Milton’s erudition and the scope of his interests. History of Britain (1670) was long in the making, for it reflects extensive reading that he began as a very young man. Presumably because he initially contemplated an epic centring upon British history and the heroic involvement of the legendary king Arthur, Milton researched early accounts of Britain, ranging across records from the Anglo-Saxon era through works by the Venerable Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth and into 16th- and 17th-century accounts by Raphael Holinshed and William Camden, along with many others. All the while, Milton critically evaluated his sources for their veracity. Because his own research and writing were interrupted by his service in Cromwell’s government, History of Britain remained incomplete even at publication, for the account ends with the Norman Conquest.

Artis Logicae (1672; “Art of Logic”) was composed in Latin, perhaps to gain the attention also of a Continental audience. It is a textbook derived from the logic of Petrus Ramus, a 16th-century French scholar whose work reflected the impact of Renaissance humanism on the so-called medieval trivium: the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Countering the orthodox Aristotelian approach to logic, Ramus adduced a number of methods by which to reorganize the arts of the trivium. Milton’s textbook is a redaction of Ramus’s methods.

De Doctrina Christiana (“On Christian Doctrine”) was probably composed between 1655 and 1660, though Milton never completed it. The unfinished manuscript was discovered in the Public Record Office in London in 1823, translated from Latin into English by Charles Sumner and published in 1825 as A Treatise on Christian Doctrine. The comprehensive and systematic theology presented in this work reflects Milton’s close engagement with Scripture, from which he draws numerous proof texts in order to buttress his concepts of the Godhead and of moral theology, among others. Like his historical account of Britain and his textbook on logic, this work is highly derivative, for many of its ideas are traceable to works by Protestant thinkers, such as the Reformed theologian John Wolleb (Johannes Wollebius). Milton also drew on other theologians, notably the English Puritans William Perkins and his student William Ames. Though Milton did not agree with all elements of their theology, like them he tended to subordinate the Son to the Father and to oppose the trinitarian orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism.

Blind and once a widower, Milton married Katherine Woodcock in 1656. Their marriage lasted only 15 months: she died within months of the birth of their child. He wedded Elizabeth Minshull in 1663, who, along with the daughters from his first marriage, assisted him with his personal needs, read from books at his request, and served as an amanuensis to record verses that he dictated. In the era after the Restoration, Milton published his three major poems, though he had begun work on two of them, Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, many years earlier.

Doré, Gustave: illustration of Satan Abandoning his earlier plan to compose an epic on Arthur, Milton instead turned to biblical subject matter and to a Christian idea of heroism. In Paradise Lost—first published in 10 books in 1667 and then in 12 books in 1674, at a length of almost 11,000 lines—Milton observed but adapted a number of the Classical epic conventions that distinguish works such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid.

Among these conventions is a focus on the elevated subjects of war, love, and heroism. In Book 6 Milton describes the battle between the good and evil angels; the defeat of the latter results in their expulsion from heaven. In the battle, the Son (Jesus Christ) is invincible in his onslaught against Satan and his cohorts. But Milton’s emphasis is less on the Son as a warrior and more on his love for humankind; the Father, in his celestial dialogue with the Son, foresees the sinfulness of Adam and Eve, and the Son chooses to become incarnate and to suffer humbly to redeem them. Though his role as saviour of fallen humankind is not enacted in the epic, Adam and Eve before their expulsion from Eden learn of the future redemptive ministry of Jesus, the exemplary gesture of self-sacrificing love. The Son’s selfless love contrasts strikingly with the selfish love of the heroes of Classical epics, who are distinguished by their valour on the battlefield, which is usually incited by pride and vainglory. Their strength and skills on the battlefield and their acquisition of the spoils of war also issue from hate, anger, revenge, greed, and covetousness. If Classical epics deem their protagonists heroic for their extreme passions, even vices, the Son in Paradise Lost exemplifies Christian heroism both through his meekness and magnanimity and through his patience and fortitude.

This muse is the Judaeo-Christian Godhead. Citing manifestations of the Godhead atop Horeb and Sinai, Milton seeks inspiration comparable to that visited upon Moses, to whom is ascribed the composition of the book of Genesis. Much as Moses was inspired to recount what he did not witness, so also Milton seeks inspiration to write about biblical events. Recalling Classical epics, in which the haunts of the muses are not only mountaintops but also waterways, Milton cites Siloa’s brook, where in the New Testament a blind man acquired sight after going there to wash off the clay and spittle placed over his eyes by Jesus. Likewise, Milton seeks inspiration to enable him to envision and narrate events to which he and all human beings are blind unless chosen for enlightenment by the Godhead. With his reference to “the Aonian mount,” or Mount Helicon in Greece, Milton deliberately invites comparison with Classical antecedents. He avers that his work will supersede these predecessors and will accomplish what has not yet been achieved: a biblical epic in English.

Paradise Lost also directly invokes Classical epics by beginning its action in medias res. Book 1 recounts the aftermath of the war in heaven, which is described only later, in Book 6. At the outset of the epic, the consequences of the loss of the war include the expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven and their descent into hell, a place of infernal torment. With the punishment of the fallen angels having been described early in the epic, Milton in later books recounts how and why their disobedience occurred. Disobedience and its consequences, therefore, come to the fore in Raphael’s instruction of Adam and Eve, who (especially in Books 6 and 8) are admonished to remain obedient. By examining the sinfulness of Satan in thought and in deed, Milton positions this part of his narrative close to the temptation of Eve. This arrangement enables Milton to highlight how and why Satan, who inhabits a serpent to seduce Eve in Book 9, induces in her the inordinate pride that brought about his own downfall. Satan arouses in Eve a comparable state of mind, which is enacted in her partaking of the forbidden fruit, an act of disobedience.

Milton’s epic begins in the hellish underworld and returns there after Satan has tempted Eve to disobedience. In line with Classical depictions of the underworld, Milton emphasizes its darkness, for hell’s fires, which are ashen gray, inflict pain but do not provide light. The torments of hell (“on all sides round”) also suggest a location like an active volcano. In the Classical tradition, Typhon, who revolted against Jove, was driven down to earth by a thunderbolt, incarcerated under Mount Etna in Sicily, and tormented by the fire of this active volcano. Accommodating this Classical analogue to his Christian perception, Milton renders hell chiefly according to biblical accounts, most notably the book of Revelation. The poem’s depictions of hell also echo the epic convention of a descent into the underworld.

Throughout Paradise Lost Milton uses a grand style aptly suited to the elevated subject matter and tone. In a prefatory note, Milton describes the poem’s metre as “English heroic verse without rhyme,” which approximates “that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin.” Rejecting rhyme as “the jingling sound of like endings,” Milton prefers a measure that is not end-stopped, so that he may employ enjambment (run-on lines) with “the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” The grand style that he adopts consists of unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse) and features sonorous rhythms pulsating through and beyond one verse into the next. By composing his biblical epic in this measure, he invites comparison with works by Classical forebears. Without using punctuation at the end of many verses, Milton also creates voluble units of rhythm and sense that go well beyond the limitations he perceived in rhymed verse.

Milton also employs other elements of a grand style, most notably epic similes. These explicit comparisons introduced by “like” or “as” proliferate across Paradise Lost. Milton tends to add one comparison after another, each one protracted. Accordingly, in one long passage in Book 1, Satan’s shield is likened to the Moon as viewed through Galileo’s telescope; his spear is larger than the mast of a flagship; the fallen angels outstretched on the lake of fire after their expulsion from heaven “lay entranced / Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa” (literally “Shady Valley,” outside Florence). The fallen angels resemble, moreover, the Egyptian cavalry that pursued the Israelites into the parted Red Sea, after which the collapse of the walls of water inundated the Egyptians and left the pharaoh’s chariots and charioteers weltering like flotsam.

Paradise Lost is ultimately not only about the downfall of Adam and Eve but also about the clash between Satan and the Son. Many readers have admired Satan’s splendid recklessness, if not heroism, in confronting the Godhead. Satan’s defiance, anger, willfulness, and resourcefulness define a character who strives never to yield. In many ways Satan is heroic when compared to such Classical prototypes as Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas and to similar protagonists in medieval and Renaissance epics. In sum, his traits reflect theirs.

But Milton composed a biblical epic in order to debunk Classical heroism and to extol Christian heroism, exemplified by the Son. Notwithstanding his victory in the battle against the fallen angels, the Son is more heroic because he is willing to undergo voluntary humiliation, a sign of his consummate love for humankind. He foreknows that he will become incarnate in order to suffer death, a selfless act whereby humankind will be redeemed. By such an act, moreover, the Son fulfills what Milton calls the “great argument” of his poem: to “justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton writes in Book 1. Despite Satan’s success against Adam and Eve, the hope of regeneration after sinfulness is provided by the Son’s self-sacrifice. Such hope and opportunity enable humankind to cooperate with the Godhead so as to defeat Satan, avoid damnation, overcome death, and ascend heavenward. Satan’s wiles, therefore, are thwarted by members of a regenerate humankind who choose to participate in the redemptive act that the Son has undertaken on their behalf.

Milton, John: Paradise Regained [Credit: The Newberry Library, Gift of Helen Swift Neilson, 1945 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)]Milton’s last two poems were published in one volume in 1671. Paradise Regained, a brief epic in four books, was followed by Samson Agonistes, a dramatic poem not intended for the stage. One story of the composition of Paradise Regained derives from Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker who read to the blind Milton and was tutored by him. Ellwood recounts that Milton gave him the manuscript of Paradise Lost for examination, and, upon returning it to the poet, who was then residing at Chalfont St. Giles, he commented, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” Visiting Milton after the poet’s return to London from Chalfont St. Giles, Ellwood records that Milton showed him the manuscript of the brief epic and remarked: “This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of.” Ellwood’s account is not repeated elsewhere, however; it remains unclear whether he embellished his role in the poem’s creation.

Paradise Regained hearkens back to the Book of Job, whose principal character is tempted by Satan to forgo his faith in God and to cease exercising patience and fortitude in the midst of ongoing and ever-increasing adversity. By adapting the trials of Job and the role of Satan as tempter and by integrating them with the accounts of Matthew and Luke of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, Milton dramatizes how Jesus embodies Christian heroism. Less sensational than that of Classical protagonists and not requiring military action for its manifestation, Christian heroism is a continuous reaffirmation of faith in God and is manifested in renewed prayer for patience and fortitude to endure and surmount adversities. By resisting temptations that pander to one’s impulses toward ease, pleasure, worldliness, and power, a Christian hero maintains a heavenly orientation that informs his actions. Satan as the tempter in Paradise Regained fails in his unceasing endeavours to subvert Jesus by various means in the wilderness. As powerful as the temptations may be, the sophistry that accompanies them is even more insidious.

In effect, Paradise Regained unfolds as a series of debates—an ongoing dialectic—in which Jesus analyzes and refutes Satan’s arguments. With clarity and cogency, Jesus rebuts any and all arguments by using recta ratio, always informed by faith in God, his father. Strikingly evident also is Jesus’ determination, an overwhelming sense of resolve to endure any and all trials visited upon him. Though Paradise Regained lacks the vast scope of Paradise Lost, it fulfills its purpose admirably by pursuing the idea of Christian heroism as a state of mind. More so than Paradise Lost, it dramatizes the inner workings of the mind of Jesus, his perception, and the interplay of faith and reason in his debates with Satan. When Jesus finally dismisses the tempter at the end of the work, the reader recognizes that the encounters in Paradise Regained reflect a high degree of psychological verisimilitude.

Like Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes focuses on the inner workings of the mind of the protagonist. This emphasis flies in the face of the biblical characterization of Samson in the Book of Judges, which celebrates his physical strength. Milton’s dramatic poem, however, begins the story of Samson after his downfall—after he has yielded his God-entrusted secret to Dalila (Delilah), suffered blindness, and become a captive of the Philistines. Tormented by anguish over his captivity, Samson is depressed by the realization that he, the prospective liberator of the Israelites, is now a prisoner, blind and powerless in the hands of his enemies. Samson vacillates from one extreme to another emotionally and psychologically. He becomes depressed, wallows in self-pity, and contemplates suicide; he becomes outraged at himself for having disclosed the secret of his strength; he questions his own nature, whether it was flawed with excessive strength and too little wisdom so that he was destined at birth to suffer eventual downfall. When Dalila visits him during his captivity and offers to minister to him, however, Samson becomes irascible, rejecting her with a harsh diatribe. In doing so, he dramatizes, unwittingly, the measure of his progress toward regeneration. Having succumbed to her previously, he has learned from past experience that Dalila is treacherous.

From that point onward in Samson Agonistes, Samson is progressively aroused from depression. He acknowledges that pride in his inordinate strength was a major factor in his downfall and that his previous sense of invincibility rendered him unwary of temptation, even to the extent that he became vulnerable to a woman whose guile charmed him. By the end of the poem, Samson, through expiation and regeneration, has regained a state of spiritual readiness in order to serve again as God’s champion. The destruction of the Philistines at the temple of Dagon results in more deaths than the sum of all previous casualties inflicted by Samson. Ironically, when he least expected it, Samson was again chosen to be God’s scourge against the Philistines.

Despite Samson’s physical feats, Milton depicts him as more heroic during his state of regeneration. Having lapsed into sinfulness when he violated God’s command not to disclose the secret of his strength, Samson suffers physically when he is blinded; he also suffers psychologically because he is enslaved by his enemies. The focus of Milton’s dramatic poem is ultimately on Samson’s regenerative process, an inner struggle beset by torment, by the anxiety that God has rejected him, and by his failure as the would-be liberator of his people.

Unlike the biblical account in Judges, Samson Agonistes focuses only on the last day of Samson’s life. Discerning that he was victimized by his own pride, Samson becomes chastened and humbled. He becomes acutely aware of the necessity to atone for his sinfulness. In a series of debates not unlike those in Paradise Regained between the Son and Satan, Samson engages Manoa, his father; Dalila, his temptress; and Harapha, a stalwart Philistine warrior. In each of these encounters, Samson’s discourse manifests an upward trajectory, through atonement and toward regeneration, which culminates in the climactic action at the temple of Dagon where Samson, again chosen by God, vindicates himself. Echoing Paradise Lost, which dramatizes the self-sacrifice of the Son, Samson Agonistes creates in its hero an Old Testament prefiguration of the very process of regeneration enabled by the Redeemer and afforded to fallen humankind. In this way, moreover, Samson exhibits the traits of Christian heroism that Milton elsewhere emphasized.

But where the Son of Paradise Regained maintains steadfastly his resistance to temptation, Samson typifies human vulnerability to downfall. Accordingly, where in Paradise Regained the Son never loses God’s favour, Samson Agonistes charts how a victim of temptation can reacquire it. Despite the superficial resemblance between his muscular, warlike acts of destruction and those of Classical heroes, Samson is ultimately a Christian hero.

After the Restoration and despite jeopardy to himself, Milton continued to advocate freedom of worship and republicanism for England while he supervised the publication of his major poems and other works. For a time soon after the succession of Charles II, Milton was under arrest and menaced by possible execution for involvement in the regicide and in Cromwell’s government. Although the circumstances of clemency toward Milton are not fully known, it is likely that certain figures influential with the regime of Charles II—such as Christopher Milton, Andrew Marvell, and William Davenant—interceded on his behalf. The exact date and location of Milton’s death remain unknown; he likely died in London on November 8, 1674, from complications of the gout (possibly renal failure). He was buried inside St. Giles Cripplegate Church in London.

Milton’s fame and reputation derive chiefly from Paradise Lost, which, when first published in 1667, did not gain wide admiration. Because of Milton’s political and religious views, only his close friends and associates commended his epic. Marvell, who assisted Milton when he was Latin secretary during the interregnum, expressed extraordinary admiration of Paradise Lost in verses at the outset of the 1674 edition. John Dryden, after having consulted with Milton and elicited his approval, adapted the epic to heroic couplets, the measure that characterized much verse in that era. The result was The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, an operatic adaptation published in 1677, though never performed. At the end of the 17th century, admiration of Paradise Lost extended beyond a small circle. Indeed, five editions of the poem appeared between 1688 and 1698, three of them in English and two in Latin; the 1695 edition in English, with Patrick Hume’s commentary and annotations, is considered the first scholarly edition.

By the early 18th century, Paradise Lost had begun to draw more acclaim. Joseph Addison published a series of essays in The Spectator (1712) in which he ranked Milton’s epic with the works of Classical antiquity. Because the Neoclassical movement in poetry, which emphasized heroic couplets, prevailed in this era, Paradise Lost was perceived as a magnificent exception in its use of blank verse. And because its genre was that of a biblical epic, Paradise Lost was granted unique status. Alexander Pope, the quintessential Neoclassical poet, borrowed heavily from the imagery of Milton’s poem and in The Rape of the Lock (1712–14) constructed a mock-epic that becomes a genial parody of Paradise Lost.

Voltaire lavishly praised Paradise Lost in 1727 when writing of epic poetry. Translations of Milton’s epic into French, German, and Italian appeared before mid-century. Joseph Warton in 1756 cited Milton’s splendid topographical settings, especially Eden in Paradise Lost, and praised the flights of sublime imagination that elevated readers into heaven and near the throne of God. In doing so, Warton emphasized two of the poem’s characteristics—Milton’s celebration of nature and his unbridled imagination—that would later be highly valued by English Romantic authors. But by the end of the 18th century, Milton’s reputation had suffered because of Samuel Johnson, whose critical biography in The Lives of the Poets (1779–81), while praising the sublimity of Paradise Lost, disfavoured Milton’s images from nature, which Johnson attributed not to direct experience but to derivations from books.

During the early 19th century, Milton became popular among a number of major Romantic authors, such as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, who in Paradise Lost perceived Satan as a heroic rebel opposing established traditions and God as a tyrant. Appropriating elements of Milton’s biography and of his works, these authors created a historical and literary context for their own revolutionary ideas. Shelley’s Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound (1820), for instance, is modeled after Milton’s Satan. By the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, however, Milton had yet again fallen into disfavour. The most influential voice lessening Milton’s reputation was that of T.S. Eliot, whose aesthetic interests gravitated toward the Metaphysical poets, certain Renaissance dramatists, and other contemporaries of Milton. Eliot complained that Milton’s epic verse lacked earnest feeling, was “stiff and tortuous,” and was so inflexible that it discouraged imitation.

Yet another shift in Milton’s reputation occurred in the late 20th century, when the author, while still appreciated for his literary and aesthetic achievements in verse, came to be viewed as a chronicler—even in his poems—of the tensions, conflicts, and upheavals of 17th-century England. At the same time, however, scholars often portrayed Milton variously as a forebear of present-day sensitivities and sensibilities and as an exponent of regressive views. In Paradise Lost, for instance, the conjugal relationship between Adam and Eve—both before and after the Fall—is strictly hierarchical, with the husband as overseer of the wife. But this representation of marriage, considered an expression of Milton’s regressive views, contrasts with The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, where Milton contends that the basis of marriage is compatibility. If the partners are no longer compatible, he argues, the marriage is in effect dissolved. Though such a liberal view of divorce was unacceptable in Milton’s era, it struck a more responsive chord in those countries where at the turn of the 21st century marriage was understood as a voluntary union between equals. By situating Milton’s work within the social, political, and religious currents of his era, scholars, nevertheless, demonstrated the enduring value and modern-day relevance of his works.