John Milton
John Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost. He dictated it — twelve books of epic verse, over ten thousand lines — to a series of amanuenses including his daughters, who were taught to read the languages aloud to him but not necessarily to understand them. He published it in 1667 at fifty-eight, selling the copyright for five pounds. It is considered the greatest epic poem in the English language.
- Born: December 9, 1608, London
- Died: November 8, 1674, London (age 65, gout)
- Era: English Renaissance; Baroque period; English Civil War
- Major works: Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), Samson Agonistes (1671), Areopagitica (1644)
- Served as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under the English Commonwealth, 1649–1660
He spent his forties as a propagandist for Oliver Cromwell's English Commonwealth, writing official defenses of regicide in Latin for a European audience — justifications for the execution of Charles I, sent to the courts of Europe to argue the case. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, he was arrested, briefly imprisoned, fined, and — largely through the intercession of friends including the poet Andrew Marvell — spared execution. He retreated into private life with his sight nearly gone and began dictating.
Paradise Lost was written to "justify the ways of God to men." What it actually produced was the most psychologically complex villain in English literature. Satan's argument in Book One — that the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven — is not refuted by the poem. It is presented as true, and seductive, and fatal. William Blake famously said Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Whether or not that is right, it is the argument the poem has been having with itself for three and a half centuries.
Before the blindness and the epic, he wrote Areopagitica — a pamphlet against censorship published in 1644 that remains one of the foundational texts of press freedom. The argument that truth is best found through open contest with error has been cited in defense of free speech for nearly four hundred years.
He was married three times, outlived two wives, and was reportedly not an easy person to live with. The grandeur of his ambitions was matched by the difficulty of his temperament. The work is the record of what that combination can produce, given enough time and enough silence.
For readers drawn to the epic, the philosophical, and the kind of writing that earns its complexity through difficulty honestly faced.
