John Milton

John Milton was a working poet and a working revolutionary — and he did his most important work blind.

Born in London in 1608, Milton spent his forties as a propagandist for Oliver Cromwell's English Commonwealth, writing official defenses of regicide in Latin for a European audience. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, he narrowly escaped execution and retreated into private life. He had already lost his sight. What came next was Paradise Lost: twelve books of epic verse dictated to his daughters, published in 1667, retelling the fall of man from first principles. Milton intended to justify the ways of God to men. What he actually wrote was the most psychologically complex villain in English literature.

Satan's argument in Book I — that the mind is its own place, that it can make a Heaven of Hell or a Hell of Heaven — is not presented as wrong. It's presented as true, and dangerous, and the reason the poem has never stopped being argued about in the three and a half centuries since it was published.