Biographies

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[align=left]Study, poetry, and travel[/align]

[align=left]Upon receiving his MA in 1632, Milton retired to his father’s country homes at Hammersmith and Horton and undertook six years of self-directed private study by reading both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature and science, in preparation for his prospective poetical career. Milton’s intellectual development can be charted via entries in his commonplace book, now in the British Library. As a result of such intensive study, Milton is considered to be among the most learned of all English poets; in addition to his six years of private study, Milton had command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; he also added Old English to his linguistic repertoire in the 1650s while researching his History of Britain, and probably acquired proficiency in Dutch soon after.

Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study: his masques Arcades and Comus were composed for noble patrons, and he contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for one of his Cambridge classmates in 1638. Drafts of these poems are preserved in Milton’s poetry notebook, known as the Trinity Manuscript because it is now kept at Trinity College, Cambridge.

After completing his course of private study in early 1638, Milton embarked upon a tour of France and Italy in May of the same year that was cut short 13 months later by what he later termed ‘sad tidings of civil war in England.’ Moving quickly through France, where he met Hugo Grotius, Milton sailed to Genoa, and quickly took in Pisa before he arrived in Florence around June. Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice were Milton’s primary stops on his lengthy Italian visit, during which his candor of manner and erudite neo-Latin poetry made him many friends in intellectual circles. Milton met a number of famous and influential people through these connections, ranging from the astronomer Galileo to the nobleman Giovanni Battista Manso, patron of Torquato Tasso, to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, uncle of Pope Urban VIII. After some time spent in Venice and other northern Italian cities, Milton returned to England in July via Switzerland and France.

Overall, in Italy Milton rejoiced in discovering the intellectual community he had missed at Cambridge--he even altered his handwriting and pronunciation of Latin to make them more Italian. At the same time, his firsthand observation of what he viewed as the superstitious tyranny of Catholicism increased his hatred for absolutist confessional states.[/align]

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[align=left]Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage[/align]

[align=left]Upon returning to England, where the Bishops' Wars suggested that armed conflict between King Charles and his parliamentary opponents was imminent, Milton put poetry aside and began to write anti-episcopal prose tracts in the service of the Puritan and Parliamentary cause. Milton’s first foray into polemics was Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England (1641), followed by Of Prelatical Episcopacy, the two defenses of Smectymnuus (an organization of Protestant divines named from their initials--the "TY" belonged to Milton's favorite teacher from St Paul's, Thomas Young), and The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty. With frequent passages of real eloquence lighting up the rough controversial style of the period, and with a wide knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquity, he vigorously attacked the High-church party of the Church of England and their leader, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Though supported by his father’s investments, at this time Milton also became a private schoolmaster, educating his nephews and other children of the well-to-do. This experience, and discussions with educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, led him to write in 1644 his short tract, On Education, urging a reform of the national universities

In June 1642, Milton took a mysterious trip into the countryside and returned with a 16-year-old bride, Mary Powell. A month later, finding life difficult with the severe 33-year-old schoolmaster and pamphleteer, Mary returned to her family. Because of the outbreak of the Civil War, she did not return until 1645; in the meantime her desertion prompted Milton, over the next three years, to publish a series of pamphlets arguing for the legality and morality of divorce. It was the hostile response accorded the divorce tracts that spurred Milton to write Areopagitica, his celebrated attack on censorship. In the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government, Milton published his 1645 Poems--the only poetry of his to see print until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.[/align]

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[align=left]Secretary of Foreign Tongues[/align]

[align=left]With the parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defense of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended popular government and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton’s political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. Though Milton's main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin, he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor. In October 1649 he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defense of the regicide, in response to the Eikon Basilike, a phenomenal best-seller popularly attributed to Charles I that portrayed the King as an innocent Christian martyr.

A month after Milton had tried to break this powerful image of Charles I, (the literal translation of Eikonklastes is 'the image breaker'), the exiled Charles II and his party published a defense of monarchy, Defensio Regia Pro Carolo Primo, written by one of Europe's most renowned orators and scholars, Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defense of the English people by the Council of State. Given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, Milton worked much slower than usual, as he drew upon the vast array of learning marshalled throughout his years of study to compose a suitably withering riposte. On February 24, 1652 Milton published his Latin defense of the English People, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, also known as the First Defense. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning, exemplified in the First Defense, quickly made him the toast of all Europe. In 1654, in response to a Royalist tract, Regii sanguinis clamor, that made many personal attacks on Milton, he completed a second defense of the English nation, Defensio secunda, which praised Oliver Cromwell, now virtually a military dictator, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander More, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor, published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. In addition to these literary defenses of the Commonwealth and his character, Milton continued to translate official correspondence into Latin. The probable onset of glaucoma finally resulted by 1654 in total blindness, forcing him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses, one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell.

After bearing him four children--Anne, Mary, John, and Deborah--Milton’s wife, Mary, died on May 5, 1652 from complications following Deborah's birth on May 2. In June, John died at age 15 months; Milton’s daughters survived to adulthood, but he always had a strained relationship with them. On November 12, 1656, Milton remarried, this time to Katherine Woodcock. Her death on February 3, 1658, less than four months after giving birth to their daughter, Katherine, who also died, prompted one of Milton’s most moving sonnets.[/align]

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[align=left]Milton and the Restoration[/align]

[align=left]Though Cromwell’s death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions, Milton stubbornly clung to the beliefs which had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth. In 1659 he published A Treatise of Civil Power, attacking the concept of a state church (known as Erastianism), as well as Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings, denouncing corrupt practices in church governance. As the Republic disintegrated Milton wrote several proposals to retain parliamentary supremacy over the army: A Letter to a Friend, Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, written in October 1659 in response to General Lambert’s recent dissolution of the Rump Parliament; Proposals of certain expedients for the preventing of a civil war now feared in November; and finally, as General Monck marched toward London to restore the Stuart monarchy, two editions of The Ready and Easy Way to Establishing a Free Commonwealth, an impassioned, bitter, and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty.

Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton went into hiding for his life as a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings burnt. Reemerging after a general pardon was issued, he was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned before influential friends, such as Marvell, now an MP, intervened. On February 24, 1663 Milton remarried, for a third and final time, a Wistaston, Cheshire-born woman Elizabeth (Betty) Minshull then aged 24, and spent the remaining decade of his life living quietly in London, with the exception of retiring to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles (his only extant home) during the Great Plague. Milton died of kidney failure on 8 November 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles Cripplegate; according to an early biographer, his funeral was attended by “his learned and great Friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the Vulgar.”[/align]

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[align=left]Paradise Lost[/align]

[align=left]Milton’s magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, which appeared in a quarto edition in 1667, was composed by the blind Milton from 1658-1664. It reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution, yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the “Good Old Cause. Though Milton notoriously sold the copyright of this monumental work to his publisher for a seemingly trifling £10, this was not a particularly outlandish deal at the time. Milton followed up Paradise Lost with its sequel, Paradise Regained, published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Both these works also resonate with Milton’s post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised the release of a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of “why the poem rhymes not” and prefatory verses by Marvell. Milton republished his 1645 Poems in 1673, as well a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days. A 1668 edition of Paradise Lost, reported to have been Milton's personal copy, is now housed in the archives of the University of Western Ontario.

During the Restoration Milton also published several minor prose works, such as a grammar textbook, his Art of Logic, and his History of Britain. His only explicitly political tracts were the 1672 Of True Religion, arguing for toleration (except for Catholics), and a translation of a Polish tract advocating an elective monarchy. Both these works participated in the Exclusion debate that would preoccupy politics in the 1670s and 80s and precipitate the formation of the Whig party and the Glorious Revolution. Milton's unfinished religious manifesto, De doctrina christiana, in which he laid out many of his heretical views, was not discovered and published until 1823.[/align]

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[align=left]Philosophy[/align]
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By the late 1650s, Milton was a proponent of monism or animist materialism, the notion that a single material substance which is "animate, self-active, and free" composes everything in the universe--from stones and trees and bodies to minds, souls, angels, and God. Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. Milton's monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat (5.433-39) and have sex (8.622-29).[/align]



[align=left]Politics[/align]

[align=left]Milton's fervent commitment to republicanism in an age of absolute monarchies was both unpopular and dangerous. In coming centuries, Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism.[/align]



[align=left]Religion[/align]

[align=left]Milton was writing at a time of religious and political flux in England. His poetry and prose reflect deep religious convictions, often reacting to contemporary circumstances, but it is not always easy to locate the writer in any obvious religious category. His views may be described as broadly Protestant. As an accomplished artist and an official in the government of Oliver Cromwell , it is not always easy to distinguish where artistic license and polemical intent overshadow Milton's personal views.

Milton embraced many theological views that put him outside of contemporary Christianity. A prime example is Milton's rejection of the Trinity in the belief that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his probable sympathy with Socinianism (modern-day Unitarianism), which held that Jesus was not divine. Another controversial view Milton subscribed to, illustrated by Paradise Lost, is mortalism, the belief that the soul dies with the body. Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimize divorce after 1645, but he expressed support for polygamy in the De doctrina christiana, the unpublished theological treatise that provides evidence for his heretical 16

Like many Renaissance artists before him, Milton integrated Christian theology into classical modes. In his early poems, the poet narrator express a tension between vice and virtue, the latter invariably related to Protestantism. In Comus MIlton may make ironic use of the Caroline court masque by elevating notions of purity and virtue over the conventions of court revelry and superstition. In his later poems, Milton's theological concerns become more explicit. In his 1641 treatise, Of Reformation, Milton expressed his dislike for Catholicism and episcopacy, presenting Rome as a modern Babylon, and bishops as Egyptian taskmasters. These analogies conform to Milton's puritanical preference for Old Testament imagery. Through the Interregnum, Milton often presents England, rescued from the trappings of a worldly monarchy, as an elect nation akin to the Old Testament Israel, and shows its leader, Oliver Cromwell, as a latter-day Moses. These views were bound up in Protestant views of the Millennium, which some sects, such as the Fifth Monarchists predicted would arrive in England. The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 began a new phase in Milton's work. In Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes Milton mourns the end of the godly Commonwealth. The Garden of Eden allegory reflects Milton's view of England's recent Fall from Grace, while Samson's blindness and captivity – mirroring Milton's own failing sight – is a metaphor for England's blind acceptance of Charles II as king. However, despite the Restoration of the monarchy Milton did not lose his own faith; Samson shows how the loss of national salvation did not necessarily preclude the salvation of the individual, while Paradise Regained expresses Milton's continuing belief in the promise of Christian salvation through Jesus Christ.[/align]

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[align=left]Legacy and influence[/align]

[align=left]Milton's literary career cast a formidable shadow over English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries; he was often judged equal or superior to all other English poets, including Shakespeare. We can point to Lucy Hutchinson's epic poem about the fall of Humanity, Order and Disorder (1679), and John Dryden's The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man: an Opera (1677) as evidence of an immediate cultural influence.

The influence of Milton's poetry and personality on the literature of the Romantic era was profound--the relationship is a quintessential example of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence." William Wordsworth began his sonnet "London, 1802" with "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour" [10] and modeled The Prelude, his own blank verse epic, on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton's style debilitating; he exclaimed that "Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour." Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a "beautiful and grand curiosity," but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry, Hyperion, is said to have suffered from Keats's failed attempt to cultivate a distinct epic voice. Mary ****ley's novel Frankenstein draws heavily on Paradise Lost. The novel begins with a quotation from Paradise Lost, and the relationship between the Creature and Frankenstein is often seen as a metaphor for the relationship between God and Adam in Paradise Lost.

The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton's influence; George Eliot[17] and Thomas Hardy being particularly inspired by Milton's poetry and biography. By contrast, the early 20th century, owing to the critical efforts of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, witnessed a reduction in Milton's stature. But more recently, there has been renewed interest in the poet's greatest work following the publication of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is heavily based on Paradise Lost.

Aside from his importance to literary history, Milton's career has influenced the modern world in other ways. Milton coined many words that are now familiar; in Paradise Lost readers were confronted by neologisms like dreary, pandæmonium, acclaim, rebuff, self-esteem, unaided, impassive, enslaved, jubilant, serried, solaced, and satanic.

In the political arena, Milton's Areopagitica and republican writings were consulted during the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America. Also, the quotation from Areopagitica—"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life"—is seen in many public libraries, including the New York Public Library.

The John Milton Society for the Blind was founded in 1928 by Helen Keller to develop an interdenominational ministry that would bring spiritual guidance and religious literature to deaf and blind persons.[/align]

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**
On May Morning

NOW the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowry May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose
Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
Mirth and youth, and warm desire
Woods and Groves, are of thy dressing
Hill and Dale, doth boast thy blessing
Thus we salute thee with our early Song
And welcom thee, and wish thee long
..
When I Consider How my Light is Spent
ON HIS BLINDNESS

WHEN I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide
?Doth God exact day-labour, light denied
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest
They also serve who only stand and wait
..
All the best fadi
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