John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 and died on 8 November 1674. He was an English poet, debater, and civil servant. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion by God from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost raised Milton’s reputation as one of history’s greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant under the Council of State of the Commonwealth of England and later under Oliver Cromwell.
Written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, it is one of the most influential and impassioned defenses of freedom of speech and freedom of the press in history. His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in his style, which included his introduction of new words (derived from Latin and Ancient Greek) into the English language.
He was the first modern writer to use rhyming verse outside of theater or translation. Milton has been described by his biographer William Haley as “the greatest English writer“, and is generally regarded as “one of the greatest writers in the English language”, although critical reception has fluctuated in the century since his death, often for this reason. His republic. The phases of Milton’s life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart England at the time.
In his early years, Milton studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and then traveled, writing poetry mostly for private publicity, and began a career as a pamphleteer and preacher under Charles’s increasingly autocratic rule and Britain’s collapse into constitutional confusion and eventual civil war.
Although once considered dangerously radical and heretical, Milton contributed in his lifetime to a seismic shift in accepted public opinion that eventually elevated him to public office in England.
The Restoration of the 1660s and the loss of his sight deprived Milton of much of his public platform, but he used this period to develop many of his larger works.
John Milton’s early life and education
John Milton the Elder (1562–1647) moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father, Richard “the Ranger” Milton, to convert to Protestantism. In London, John Milton Sr. married Sarah Jeffery (1572–1637) and found lasting financial success as a writer. He lived and worked in a cheap house on Bread Street, where the Mermaid Tavern was located.
The elder Milton was well known for his skill as a composer of music, and this talent left his son with a lifelong appreciation for music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes. Milton’s father’s affluence allowed his eldest son to have a private tutor, Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian with an MA from the University of St Andrews.
Young’s influence also serves as an introduction to the poet’s religious radicalism. After Young’s tutorship, Milton attended St. Paul’s School in London, where he began to study Latin and Greek; Classical languages left an imprint on both his poetry and prose in English (he also wrote in Latin and Italian). Milton’s first recorded works are two hymns written at Long Bennington at the age of 15.
In 1625, Milton entered Christ’s College, Cambridge University, where he graduated with a BA in 1629, ranking fourth out of 24 honors graduates at Cambridge University that year.
At the time, preparing to become an Anglican priest, he stayed at Cambridge where he received his MA on 3 July 1632. Milton may have been rusticated (suspended) in his first year at Cambridge for quarreling with his tutor, Bishop William Chappell. He must have been at home in London in the Lent term of 1626; There he wrote his first Latin elegy, Elegia Prima, to Charles Diodati, a friend of St. Paul.
Based on John Aubrey’s comments, Chappell “whips” Milton. This story is now disputed, although certainly Milton disliked Chappell. Historian Christopher Hill notes that Milton was maligned and that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal.
It is also possible that, like Isaac Newton, four decades later, Milton was sent home from Cambridge because of the plague, which struck Cambridge in 1625. At Cambridge Milton had a good relationship with Edward King; He later dedicated “Lycidus” to him.
Despite gaining a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, Milton suffered isolation among his peers while at Cambridge. Once he saw his fellow students attempt comedy on the college stage, he later observed, “They thought themselves brave men and I thought them fools“.
Milton also hated the university curriculum, which consisted of formal debates fixed on abstract topics in Latin. His corpus is not devoid of humor, notably his epitaphs on the sixth prologue and the death of Thomas Hobson.
While at Cambridge, he wrote some of his best-known short English poems, including “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity“, and “Epitaph on the Admired Dramatic Poet, W.
Study, poetry, and travel
After receiving his MA, Milton moved to Hammersmith, his father’s new home from the previous year. He also lived at Horton in Berkshire from 1635 and spent six years of self-directed private study. Hill argues that it did not recede into a rural idyll; Hammersmith was then a “suburban village” within the orbit of London, and even Horton suffered from deforestation and plague.
He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and science in preparation for a possible poetic career. In addition to years of private study, Milton had Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; He added Old English to his linguistic repertoire while researching the history of Britain in the 1650s, and probably acquired proficiency in Dutch soon after.
During this period of study, Milton continued to write poetry; Both his Arcade and Comus were commissioned masques for aristocratic patrons, connections to the Egerton family, and executed in 1632 and 1634 respectively.
Drafts of these poems are preserved in Milton’s poetry notebooks, known as the Trinity Manuscripts, as they are now housed at Trinity College, Cambridge. In May 1638, with a retinue, Milton embarked on a 15-month tour of France and Italy that lasted until July or August 1639.
His travels complemented his studies with new and direct experiences of artistic and religious traditions, particularly Roman Catholicism. He met famous theorists and intellectuals of the time and was able to demonstrate his poetic skills.
For the specifics of what happened during Milton’s “Grand Tour,” there seems to be only one primary source: Milton’s own Defensio Secunda.
His other prose tracts include some letters and other records with some references, but most of the information about the tour comes from a work that, according to Barbara Lewalski, was “designed not as autobiography but as rhetoric, to emphasize his reputation among scholars in Europe.”
John Milton poetry
Milton’s poetry was slow to see the light of day, at least in his name. Milton collected his work in Poems in 1645 amid the excitement of attending the prospect of establishing a new English government. The anonymous edition of Comus was published in 1637, and in 1638 the publication of Lycidas in Justa Edoardo king Naufrago was signed J. M. otherwise. The 1645 collection was his only poem to be printed until Paradise Lost was published in 1667.
John Milton and Paradise lost
Milton’s magnum opus, the blank-verse epic Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition), with minor but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of assistants in his recruitment. It has been argued that the poem reflects his despair at the failure of the revolution yet affirms the ultimate optimism of human potential.
On 27 April 1667, Milton sold the publishing rights to Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5 (equivalent to about £770 in 2015 purchasing power), with a further £5 to be paid when each printing was sold. 1,300 and 1,500 copies. The first run was a quarto edition priced at three shillings (equivalent to about £23 in 2015 purchasing power) per copy, published in August 1667, and it sold out in eighteen months.
John Milton on his blindness
The restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 ushered in a new phase of Milton’s work. Milton laments the end of the divine commonwealth in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The Garden of Eden may allegorically reflect Milton’s view of England’s recent fall from grace, while Samson’s John Milton on his blindness and captivity—Milton’s lost sight—may be an allegory for England’s blind acceptance of Charles II as king. Illustrated by Paradise Lost is moralism, the belief that the soul remains dormant after the body dies.
Milton’s continued faith in the promise of Christian salvation through Jesus Christ. Although he maintained his faith after the defeat of his cause, the Dictionary of National Biography describes how he was excommunicated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud and then similarly turned away from the Dissenters, condemning religious toleration in England.
Milton came to stand apart from all sects, though the Quakers were considered the most natural. Later he never attended any religious services. When a servant brings back the details of a sermon from a nonconformist meeting, Milton becomes so sarcastic that the man finally leaves his place. On Milton’s mystical and often contradictory views on the Puritan era, David Dyches writes,
A fair theological summary might be that John Milton was a Puritan, although his tendency to press further for freedom of conscience, sometimes out of conviction and often out of mere intellectual curiosity, made this great man at least an indispensable if not uneasy ally. In the larger Puritan movement.
