Profile of John Milton on Famous Like Me

John Milton, Jr. (December 9, 1608 - November 8, 1674) was a poet, best-known for his epic poem Paradise Lost. He was born in Cheapside, England.

Life

Milton was born on December 9th, 1608 in Cheapside, England. His father, John Milton Sr. (1562? – 1647), moved to London around 1583 having just been disinherited for concealing his Protestantism by his devout Catholic father, Richard Milton, who was a wealthy landowner in Oxfordshire. In 1600, Milton Sr. probably married Sara Jeffrey (1572 – 1637), the poet’s mother, around the same time. Milton was originally destined to a ministerial career, but his independent spirit led him to give up this career. He matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1625 and studied there for seven years before he graduated Master of Arts cum laude on July 3 1632. Upon graduating from Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1632 Milton undertook six years of self-directed private study in both the ancient and modern disciplines of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature and science, in preparation for his prospective poetical career. As a result of such intensive study, Milton is considered to be among the most learned of all English poets.

After completing his six years 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. In June 1642, Milton married 16 year-old Mary Powell. A month later, she visited her family and didn't return. Over the next three years, Milton published a series of pamphlets arguing for the legality and morality of divorce, the first entitled The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in which he attacked the English marriage law as it had been taken over almost unchanged from medieval Catholicism, sanctioning divorce on the ground of incompatibility or childlessness. In 1645, Mary finally returned. In 1646, her family, having been ejected from Oxford for supporting Charles I in the Civil War, moved in with the couple. They had 4 children: Anne, Mary, John, and Deborah. Mary died on May 5, 1652 from complications following Deborah's birth on May 2, which may have affected Milton deeply, as evidenced by his 23rd sonnet. In June, John died at age 15 months; it is not known if Anne or Deborah survived to adulthood. However, Mary is known to have survived to adulthood. On November 12, 1656, Milton married Katherine Woodcock. She died on February 3, 1658, less than 4 months after giving birth to their daughter, Katherine, who died on March 17. On February 24, 1663, Milton married Elizabeth Minshull, who cared for him until his death on November 8th, 1674.

Career

Milton spent years devoted almost entirely to prose work in the service of the Puritan and Parliamentary cause. The onset of glaucoma, exacerbated by his incessant labours setting the typeface for numerous controversial pamphlets, eventuated in blindness, forcing him, from 1654, to dictate his verse and prose to an amanuensis. Milton wrote propaganda for the English Republic in the early 1650s. When he was caught and arrested in October 1659 he was not summarily executed; several influential people spoken on his behalf, including poet Andrew Marvell, a former assistant. Milton then lived in retirement, devoting himself once more to poetical work, and publishing Paradise Lost in 1667, the epic by which he attained universal fame (blind and impoverished he sold the publishing rights to this work on April 27th that year for £10), to be followed by Paradise Regained, together with Samson Agonistes, a drama on the Greek model, in 1671.

Despite the comprehensive scope of Milton’s intellectual enquiry, crucial influences upon Milton’s literary work can be easily found and include the Biblical books of Genesis, Job, and Psalms, Homer, Virgil, and Lucan. Milton’s favourite historian was Sallust; however, though Milton’s work often betrays his classical and biblical influences, allusions to Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Shakespeare are also detectable; some commentators have suggested that Milton also sought to undermine the tropes and style of cavalier poets such John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Sir John Suckling in the conversations of Adam and Eve. Milton’s literary career cast such a formidable shadow over English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries that he was often judged favourably against 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 unparalleled scope of Paradise Lost, his masterpiece, portrays God justifying his actions, the poem also depicts the creation of the universe, earth, and humanity; conveys the origin of sin, death, and evil, imagines events in the Kingdom of Heaven, the garden of Eden, and the sacred history of Israel; engages with political ideas of tyranny, liberty and justice, and defends theological positions on predestination, free will, and salvation. Milton’s influence on the literature of the Romantic era was profound.⁷ 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 Keat’s failed attempt to cultivate a distinct epic voice. The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton’s influence; George Eliot^* and Thomas Hardy being particularly inspired by Milton’s poetry and biography. By contrast, the twentieth century, due primarily to the critical efforts of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, witnessed a reduction in Milton’s stature. Aside from his importance to literary history, Milton’s career has impacted upon the modern world in other ways. Milton coined many familiar modern words; in Paradise Lost readers were confronted by neologisms like dreary, pandæmonium, acclaim, rebuff, self-esteem, unaided, impassive, enslaved, jubilant, serried, solaced, and satanic. In terms of politics, Milton’s Areopagitica and republican writings were consulted during the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America.

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.

Bibliography

• Comus, (1634)
• Lycidas, (1638)
• Of Reformation, (1641)
• Of Prelatical Episcopacy, (1641)
• Animadversions, (1641)
• The Reason for Church Government, (1642)
• Apology for Smectymnuus, (1642)
• Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, (1643)
• Of Education, (1644)
• Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce, (1644)
• Areopagitica, (1644)
• Tetrachordon, (1645)
• Colasterion, (1645)
• Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin, (1645)
• Tenure of King's and magistrates, (1649)
• Eikonoklastes, (1649)
• Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, (1651)
• Defensio Seconda, (1654)
• A treatise of Civil Power, (1659)
• The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings from the Church, (1659)
• Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, (1659)
• Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon, (1660)
• Paradise Lost, (1667)
• Accedence Commenced Grammar, (1669)
• History of Britain, (1670)
• Samson Agonistes, (1671)
• Paradise Regained, (1671)
• Art of Logic, (1672)
• Of True Religion, (1673)
• Poems, &c, Upon Several Occasions, (1673)
• Epistolae Familiaries, (1674)
• Prolusiones, (1674)

External Links

• Milton Reading Room-online collection of all of Milton's poetry and selections of his prose
• Essay on John Milton’s On Shakespear
• "Milton and De Doctrina Christiana" by Gordon Campbell et al., 1996.
• "The masque in Milton's Arcades and Comus" by Gilbert McInnis.

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