Blind republican who wrote Paradise Lost after the Restoration
John Milton (1608–1674) forged Paradise Lost in blank verse across twelve books—Eden lost, Satan tempting, exile from the garden—while serving the Commonwealth and later living under the restored monarchy that had stripped his public power.
Bread Street son of a Protestant scrivener-composer who had been disinherited for leaving Catholicism, Milton studied under radical tutor Thomas Young, then St Paul’s and Christ’s College, Cambridge (BA 1629, MA 1632). Peers nicknamed him the Lady of Christ’s; Aubrey records late-night study. He may have been rusticated after clashing with tutor William Chappell. Shorter English pieces—Nativity ode, Shakespeare epitaph, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso—date from Cambridge years.
Six years of private study at Hammersmith and Horton stocked theology, philosophy, history, and science; languages spanned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, later Old English and Dutch. Comus and Arcades served Egerton masques; Lycidas mourned Edward King. A 1638–39 grand tour took him to Paris (meeting Grotius), Florence (including Galileo under house arrest), Rome, and Naples—rhetoric as much as autobiography in his later Defensio Secunda account.
Areopagitica (1644) remains a landmark defence of press freedom; he coined English words from classical roots and pioneered unrhymed verse beyond stage and translation. Biographer William Hayley called him the greatest English author; Johnson praised Paradise Lost’s design while scorning his “surly republican” politics. Blake, Wordsworth, and Hardy revered him; Eliot was cooler. By death he was poor and sidelined at home yet famous across Europe, unapologetic about choices that put him against the crown.
Civil-war pamphleteer, Council of State servant under Cromwell, then epic poet in darkness: the sequence explains why the Fall story still carries a partisan charge in English letters.
Source: John Milton
