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John Milton

January 26, 2023

For other people named John Milton, see John Milton (disambiguation).

John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost is widely considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written, and it elevated Milton's widely-held reputation as one of history's greatest poets.[1][2] He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.

John Milton
Portrait of Milton, c. 1629
Born(1608-12-09)9 December 1608
Bread Street, Cheapside, London, England
Died8 November 1674(1674-11-08) (aged 65)
Bunhill Row, London, England
Resting placeSt Giles-without-Cripplegate
Alma materChrist's College, Cambridge
Occupations
  • Poet
  • Intellectual
  • Civil Servant
Spouse(s)
Mary Powell
​
​
(m. 1642; died 1652)​

Katherine Woodcock
​
​
(m. 1656; died 1658)​

Elizabeth Mynshull
​
(m. 1663)​
Children5
Writing career
LanguageEnglish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, Old English, Dutch, Aramaic, Syriac
Notable worksParadise Lost
Areopagitica
Lycidas
Signature

Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, Milton achieved global fame and recognition during his lifetime; his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in his style, which included his introduction of new words (coined from Latin and Ancient Greek) to the English language. He was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations.

Milton is described as the "greatest English author" by biographer William Hayley,[3] and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language",[4] though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death often on account of his republicanism. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind", though he (a Tory) described Milton's politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican".[5] Milton was revered by poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy.

Phases of Milton's life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart England at the time. In his early years, Milton studied at Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, one of the world's most prestigious universities, and then travelled, wrote poetry mostly for private circulation, and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under Charles I's increasingly autocratic rule and Britain's breakdown into constitutional confusion and ultimately civil war. While once considered dangerously radical and heretical, Milton contributed to a seismic shift in accepted public opinions during his life that ultimately elevated him to public office in England. The Restoration of 1660 and his loss of vision later deprived Milton much of his public platform, but he used the period to develop many of his major works.

Milton's views developed from extensive reading, travel, and experience that began with his days as a student at Cambridge in the 1620s and continued through the English Civil War, which started in 1642 and continued through 1651.[6] By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life but famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for political choices that placed him at odds with governing authorities.

Early life and education

Main article: Early life of John Milton
 
Blue plaque on London's Bread Street, commemorating Milton's birthplace
 
Portrait of Milton at age 10 in Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St Giles painted by Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen

John Milton was born in Bread Street, London, on 9 December 1608, the son of composer John Milton and his wife Sarah Jeffrey. The senior John Milton (1562–1647) moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father Richard "the Ranger" Milton for embracing Protestantism.[7] In London, the senior John Milton married Sarah Jeffrey (1572–1637) and found lasting financial success as a scrivener.[8] He lived in and worked from a house in Cheapside, at Bread Street where the Mermaid Tavern was located. The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a musical composer, and this talent left his son with a lifelong appreciation for music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes.[9]

The prosperity of Milton's father allowed his eldest son to obtain a private tutor, Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian with a MA from the University of St. Andrews. Young's influence also served as the poet's introduction to religious radicalism.[10] After Young's tutorship, Milton attended St Paul's School in London, where he began the study of Latin and Greek; the classical languages left an imprint on both his poetry and prose in English (he also wrote in Latin and Italian).

Milton's first datable compositions are two psalms written at age 15 at Long Bennington. One contemporary source is Brief Lives of John Aubrey, an uneven compilation including first-hand reports. In the work, Aubrey quotes Christopher, Milton's younger brother: "When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night". Aubrey adds, "His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College."[11]

In 1625, Milton gained entry to Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in 1629,[12] ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year in the University of Cambridge.[13] Then preparing to become an Anglican priest, Milton then pursued his Master of Arts degree at Cambridge, which he received on 3 July 1632.

Milton may have been rusticated (suspended) in his first year at Cambridge for quarrelling with his tutor, Bishop William Chappell. He was certainly at home in London in the Lent Term 1626; there he wrote Elegia Prima, his first Latin elegy, to Charles Diodati, a friend from St Paul's. Based on remarks of John Aubrey, Chappell "whipt" Milton.[11] This story is now disputed, though certainly Milton disliked Chappell.[14] Historian Christopher Hill notes that Milton was apparently rusticated, and that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal.[15] It is also possible that, like Isaac Newton four decades later, Milton was sent home from Cambridge because of the plague, which impacted Cambridge significantly in 1625.

At Cambridge, Milton was on good terms with Edward King; he later dedicated "Lycidas" to him. Milton also befriended Anglo-American dissident and theologian Roger Williams. Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch.[16][better source needed] Despite developing a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, Milton suffered from alienation among his peers during his time at Cambridge. Having once watched his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage, he later observed, "they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools".[17]

Milton also was disdainful of the university curriculum, which consisted of stilted formal debates conducted in Latin on abstruse topics. His own corpus is not devoid of humour, notably his sixth prolusion and his epitaphs on the death of Thomas Hobson. While at Cambridge, he wrote a number of his well-known shorter English poems, including "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity", "Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare" (his first poem to appear in print), L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso.

Study, poetry, and travel

Further information: Early life of John Milton

It appears in all his writings that he had the usual concomitant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps not without some contempt of others; for scarcely any man ever wrote so much, and praised so few. Of his praise he was very frugal; as he set its value high, and considered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of time, and a certain preservative from oblivion.[18]

— Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

Upon receiving his M.A. in 1632, Milton retired to Hammersmith, his father's new home since the previous year. He also lived at Horton, Berkshire, from 1635 and undertook six years of self-directed private study. Hill argues that this was not retreat into a rural idyll; Hammersmith was then a "suburban village" falling into the orbit of London, and even Horton was becoming deforested and suffered from the plague.[19] He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and science in preparation for a prospective poetical career. Milton's intellectual development can be charted via entries in his commonplace book (like a scrapbook), 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 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.[20]

 
Commemorative blue plaque 'John Milton lived here 1632–1638' at Berkyn Manor Farm, Horton, Berkshire

Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study; his Arcades and Comus were both commissioned for masques composed for noble patrons, connections of the Egerton family, and performed in 1632 and 1634 respectively. Comus argues for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. He contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for one of his fellow-students at Cambridge. 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.

In May 1638, accompanied by a manservant, Milton embarked upon a tour of France and Italy for 15 months that lasted until July or August 1639.[21] His travels supplemented his study with new and direct experience of artistic and religious traditions, especially Roman Catholicism. He met famous theorists and intellectuals of the time, and was able to display his poetic skills. For specific details of what happened within Milton's "grand tour", there appears to be just one primary source: Milton's own Defensio Secunda. There are other records, including some letters and some references in his other prose tracts, but the bulk of the information about the tour comes from a work that, according to Barbara Lewalski, "was not intended as autobiography but as rhetoric, designed to emphasise his sterling reputation with the learned of Europe."[22]

He first went to Calais and then on to Paris, riding horseback, with a letter from diplomat Henry Wotton to ambassador John Scudamore. Through Scudamore, Milton met Hugo Grotius, a Dutch law philosopher, playwright, and poet. Milton left France soon after this meeting. He travelled south from Nice to Genoa, and then to Livorno and Pisa. He reached Florence in July 1638. While there, Milton enjoyed many of the sites and structures of the city. His candour of manner and erudite neo-Latin poetry earned him friends in Florentine intellectual circles, and he met the astronomer Galileo who was under house arrest at Arcetri, as well as others.[23] Milton probably visited the Florentine Academy and the Accademia della Crusca along with smaller academies in the area, including the Apatisti and the Svogliati.

In [Florence], which I have always admired above all others because of the elegance, not just of its tongue, but also of its wit, I lingered for about two months. There I at once became the friend of many gentlemen eminent in rank and learning, whose private academies I frequented—a Florentine institution which deserves great praise not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse.[24]

— Milton's account of Florence in Defensio Secunda

He left Florence in September to continue to Rome. With the connections from Florence, Milton was able to have easy access to Rome's intellectual society. His poetic abilities impressed those like Giovanni Salzilli, who praised Milton within an epigram. In late October, Milton attended a dinner given by the English College, Rome, despite his dislike for the Society of Jesus, meeting English Catholics who were also guests—theologian Henry Holden and the poet Patrick Cary.[25] He also attended musical events, including oratorios, operas, and melodramas. Milton left for Naples toward the end of November, where he stayed only for a month because of the Spanish control.[26] During that time, he was introduced to Giovanni Battista Manso, patron to both Torquato Tasso and to Giambattista Marino.[27]

Originally, Milton wanted to leave Naples in order to travel to Sicily and then on to Greece, but he returned to England during the summer of 1639 because of what he claimed in Defensio Secunda[28] were "sad tidings of civil war in England."[29] Matters became more complicated when Milton received word that his childhood friend Diodati had died. Milton in fact stayed another seven months on the continent, and spent time at Geneva with Diodati's uncle after he returned to Rome. In Defensio Secunda, Milton proclaimed that he was warned against a return to Rome because of his frankness about religion, but he stayed in the city for two months and was able to experience Carnival and meet Lukas Holste, a Vatican librarian who guided Milton through its collection. He was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini who invited Milton to an opera hosted by the Cardinal. Around March, Milton travelled once again to Florence, staying there for two months, attending further meetings of the academies, and spending time with friends. After leaving Florence, he travelled through Lucca, Bologna, and Ferrara before coming to Venice. In Venice, Milton was exposed to a model of Republicanism, later important in his political writings, but he soon found another model when he travelled to Geneva. From Switzerland, Milton travelled to Paris and then to Calais before finally arriving back in England in either July or August 1639.[30]

Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage

Main article: Milton's antiprelatical tracts
 
Title page of the 1644 edition of Areopagitica

On returning to England where the Bishops' Wars presaged further armed conflict, Milton began to write prose tracts against episcopacy, 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 defences of Smectymnuus (a group of Presbyterian divines named from their initials; the "TY" belonged to Milton's old tutor Thomas Young), and The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty. He vigorously attacked the High-church party of the Church of England and their leader William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, with frequent passages of real eloquence lighting up the rough controversial style of the period, and deploying a wide knowledge of church history.

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

In June 1642, Milton paid a visit to the manor house at Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, and, aged 34, married the 17-year-old Mary Powell.[31][32] The marriage got off to a poor start as Mary did not adapt to Milton's austere lifestyle or get along with his nephews. Milton found her intellectually unsatisfying and disliked the royalist views she had absorbed from her family. It is also speculated that she refused to consummate the marriage. Mary soon returned home to her parents and did not come back until 1645, partly because of the outbreak of the Civil War.[31]

In the meantime, her desertion prompted Milton to publish a series of pamphlets over the next three years arguing for the legality and morality of divorce beyond grounds of adultery. (Anna Beer, one of Milton's most recent biographers[as of?], points to a lack of evidence and the dangers of cynicism in urging that it was not necessarily the case that the private life so animated the public polemicising.) In 1643, Milton had a brush with the authorities over these writings, in parallel with Hezekiah Woodward, who had more trouble.[33] It was the hostile response accorded the divorce tracts that spurred Milton to write Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parlament of England, his celebrated attack on pre-printing censorship. In Areopagitica, Milton aligns himself with the parliamentary cause, and he also begins to synthesize the ideal of neo-Roman liberty with that of Christian liberty. Milton also courted another woman during this time; we know nothing of her except that her name was Davis and she turned him down. However, it was enough to induce Mary Powell into returning to him which she did unexpectedly by begging him to take her back. She bore him two daughters in quick succession following their reconciliation.[34][35]

Secretary for Foreign Tongues

With the Parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended the right of the people to hold their rulers to account, and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton's political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. His main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin and other languages, but he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor.[36]

 
The back of no 19 York Street (1848). In 1651, Milton moved into a "pretty garden-house" in Petty France, Westminster. He lived there until the Restoration. Later it became No. 19 York Street, belonged to Jeremy Bentham, was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt, and finally was demolished in 1877.[37]

In October 1649, he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defence 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 later the exiled Charles II and his party published the defence of monarchy Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo, written by leading humanist Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State. Milton worked more slowly than usual, given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, as he drew on the learning marshalled by his years of study to compose a riposte.

On 24 February 1652, Milton published his Latin defence of the English people Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, also known as the First Defence. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning exemplified in the First Defence quickly made him a European reputation, and the work ran to numerous editions.[38] He addressed his Sonnet 16 to 'The Lord Generall Cromwell in May 1652' beginning "Cromwell, our chief of men...", although it was not published until 1654.[39]

In 1654, Milton completed the second defence of the English nation Defensio secunda in response to an anonymous Royalist tract "Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos" [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides], a work that made many personal attacks on Milton.[40] The second defence praised Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander Morus, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor (in fact by Peter du Moulin), published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. Milton held the appointment of Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State until 1660, although after he had become totally blind, most of the work was done by his deputies, Georg Rudolph Wecklein, then Philip Meadows, and from 1657 by the poet Andrew Marvell.[41]

By 1652, Milton had become totally blind;[42] the cause of his blindness is debated but bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma are most likely.[43] His blindness forced him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses who copied them out for him; one of these was Andrew Marvell. One of his best-known sonnets, When I Consider How My Light is Spent, titled by a later editor, John Newton, "On His Blindness", is presumed to date from this period.[44]

The Restoration

Cromwell's death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions. Milton, however, stubbornly clung to the beliefs that had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth. In 1659, he published A Treatise of Civil Power, attacking the concept of a state-dominated church (the position known as Erastianism), as well as Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings, denouncing corrupt practises in church governance. As the Republic disintegrated, Milton wrote several proposals to retain a non-monarchical government against the wishes of parliament, soldiers, and the people.[45][46]

  • A Letter to a Friend, Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, written in October 1659, was a response to General Lambert's recent dissolution of the Rump Parliament.
  • Proposals of certain expedients for the preventing of a civil war now feared, written in November 1659.
  • The Ready and Easy Way to Establishing a Free Commonwealth, in two editions, responded to General Monck's march towards London to restore the Long Parliament (which led to the restoration of the monarchy). The work is an impassioned, bitter, and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty and advocating the establishment of an authoritarian rule by an oligarchy set up by unelected parliament.

Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton, fearing for his life, went into hiding, while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings were burnt. He re-emerged after a general pardon was issued, but was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned before influential friends intervened, such as Marvell, now an MP. Milton married for a third and final time on 24 February 1663, marrying Elizabeth (Betty) Minshull, aged 24, a native of Wistaston, Cheshire. He spent the remaining decade of his life living quietly in London, only retiring to a cottage during the Great Plague of London—Milton's Cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, his only extant home.

During this period, Milton published several minor prose works, such as the grammar textbook Art of Logic and a 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 were referred to in the Exclusion debate, the attempt to exclude the heir presumptive from the throne of England—James, Duke of York—because he was Roman Catholic. That debate preoccupied politics in the 1670s and 1680s and precipitated the formation of the Whig party and the Glorious Revolution.

Death

 
 
Milton’s statue and memorial in St Giles-without-Cripplegate church, London

Milton died on 8 November 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, Fore Street, London.[47] However, sources differ as to whether the cause of death was consumption or gout.[47][48] 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."[49] A monument was added in 1793, sculpted by John Bacon the Elder.

Family

Milton and his first wife Mary Powell (1625–1652) had four children:[50]

  • Anne (born 29 July 1646)
  • Mary (born 25 October 1648)
  • John (16 March 1651 – June 1652)
  • Deborah (2 May 1652 – 10 August 1727[51])

Mary Powell died on 5 May 1652 from complications following Deborah's birth. Milton's daughters survived to adulthood, but he always had a strained relationship with them.

On 12 November 1656, Milton was married to Katherine Woodcock at St Margaret's, Westminster.[52] She died on 3 February 1658, less than four months after giving birth to her daughter Katherine, who also died.

Milton married for a third time on 24 February 1663 to Elizabeth Mynshull or Minshull (1638–1728), the niece of Thomas Mynshull, a wealthy apothecary and philanthropist in Manchester. The marriage took place at St Mary Aldermary in the City of London. Despite a 31-year age gap, the marriage seemed happy, according to John Aubrey, and lasted more than 12 years until Milton's death. (A plaque on the wall of Mynshull's House in Manchester describes Elizabeth as Milton's "3rd and Best wife".) Samuel Johnson, however, claims that Mynshull was "a domestic companion and attendant" and that Milton's nephew Edward Phillips relates that Mynshull "oppressed his children in his lifetime, and cheated them at his death".[53]

His nephews, Edward and John Phillips (sons of Milton's sister Anne), were educated by Milton and became writers themselves. John acted as a secretary, and Edward was Milton's first biographer.

Poetry

Milton's poetry was slow to see the light of day, at least under his name. His first published poem was "On Shakespeare" (1630), anonymously included in the Second Folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays in 1632. An annotated copy of the First Folio has been suggested to contain marginal notes by Milton.[54] Milton collected his work in 1645 Poems in the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government. The anonymous edition of Comus was published in 1637, and the publication of Lycidas in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago was signed J. M. Otherwise. The 1645 collection was the only poetry of his to see print until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.

Paradise Lost

Main article: Paradise Lost
 
Milton Dictates the Lost Paradise to His Three Daughters, ca. 1826, by Eugène Delacroix

Milton's magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition), with small but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ. It has been argued that the poem reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Some literary critics have argued that Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the "Good Old Cause".[55]

On 27 April 1667,[56] Milton sold the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5 (equivalent to approximately £770 in 2015 purchasing power),[57] with a further £5 to be paid if and when each print run sold out of between 1,300 and 1,500 copies.[58] The first run was a quarto edition priced at three shillings per copy (about £23 in 2015 purchasing power equivalent), published in August 1667, and it sold out in eighteen months.[59]

Milton followed up the publication Paradise Lost with its sequel Paradise Regained, which was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671. Both of these works also reflect Milton's post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of "why the poem rhymes not", and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell. In 1673, Milton republished his 1645 Poems, as well as a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days.

Views

An unfinished religious manifesto, De doctrina christiana, probably written by Milton, lays out many of his heterodox theological views, and was not discovered and published until 1823. Milton's key beliefs were idiosyncratic, not those of an identifiable group or faction, and often they go well beyond the orthodoxy of the time. Their tone, however, stemmed from the Puritan emphasis on the centrality and inviolability of conscience.[60] He was his own man, but he was anticipated by Henry Robinson in Areopagitica.[clarification needed]

Philosophy

While Milton's beliefs are generally considered to be consistent with Protestant Christianity, Stephen Fallon argues that by the late 1650s, Milton may have at least toyed with the idea 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.[61] Fallon claims that Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. According to Fallon, Milton's monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat (5.433–439)[clarification needed] and apparently engage in sexual intercourse (8.622–629)[clarification needed] and the De Doctrina, where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo.

Political thought

Main article: John Milton's politics

Milton was a "passionately individual Christian Humanist poet."[62] He appears on the pages of seventeenth century English Puritanism, an age characterized as "the world turned upside down."[63] He was a Puritan and yet was unwilling to surrender conscience to party positions on public policy. Thus, Milton's political thought, driven by competing convictions, a Reformed faith and a Humanist spirit, led to enigmatic outcomes.

Milton’s apparently contradictory stance on the vital problems of his age, arose from religious contestations, to the questions of the divine rights of kings. In both the cases, he seems in control, taking stock of the situation arising from the polarization of the English society on religious and political lines. He fought with the Puritans against the Cavaliers i.e. the King’s party, and helped win the day. But the very same constitutional and republican polity, when tried to curtail freedom of speech, Milton, given his humanistic zeal, wrote Areopagitica . . . [sic][64]

 
Title page of John Milton's 1644 edition of Areopagitica

Areopagitica was written in response to the Licensing Order, in November 1644.[65]

Milton's political thought may be best categorized according to respective periods in his life and times. The years 1641–42 were dedicated to church politics and the struggle against episcopacy. After his divorce writings, Areopagitica, and a gap, he wrote in 1649–54 in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, and in polemic justification of the regicide and the existing Parliamentarian regime. Then in 1659–60 he foresaw the Restoration, and wrote to head it off.[66]

Milton's own beliefs were in some cases unpopular, particularly his commitment to republicanism. In coming centuries, Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism.[67] According to James Tully:

... with Locke as with Milton, republican and contraction conceptions of political freedom join hands in common opposition to the disengaged and passive subjection offered by absolutists such as Hobbes and Robert Filmer.[68]

A friend and ally in the pamphlet wars was Marchamont Nedham. Austin Woolrych considers that although they were quite close, there is "little real affinity, beyond a broad republicanism", between their approaches.[69] Blair Worden remarks that both Milton and Nedham, with others such as Andrew Marvell and James Harrington, would have taken their problem with the Rump Parliament to be not the republic itself, but the fact that it was not a proper republic.[70] Woolrych speaks of "the gulf between Milton's vision of the Commonwealth's future and the reality".[71] In the early version of his History of Britain, begun in 1649, Milton was already writing off the members of the Long Parliament as incorrigible.[72]

He praised Oliver Cromwell as the Protectorate was set up; though subsequently he had major reservations. When Cromwell seemed to be backsliding as a revolutionary, after a couple of years in power, Milton moved closer to the position of Sir Henry Vane, to whom he wrote a sonnet in 1652.[73][74] The group of disaffected republicans included, besides Vane, John Bradshaw, John Hutchinson, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Marten, Robert Overton, Edward Sexby and John Streater; but not Marvell, who remained with Cromwell's party.[75] Milton had already commended Overton, along with Edmund Whalley and Bulstrode Whitelocke, in Defensio Secunda.[76] Nigel Smith writes that

... John Streater, and the form of republicanism he stood for, was a fulfilment of Milton's most optimistic ideas of free speech and of public heroism [...][77]

As Richard Cromwell fell from power, he envisaged a step towards a freer republic or "free commonwealth", writing in the hope of this outcome in early 1660. Milton had argued for an awkward position, in the Ready and Easy Way, because he wanted to invoke the Good Old Cause and gain the support of the republicans, but without offering a democratic solution of any kind.[78] His proposal, backed by reference (amongst other reasons) to the oligarchical Dutch and Venetian constitutions, was for a council with perpetual membership. This attitude cut right across the grain of popular opinion of the time, which swung decisively behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy that took place later in the year.[79] Milton, an associate of and advocate on behalf of the regicides, was silenced on political matters as Charles II returned.

Theology

Main article: John Milton's religion

Milton was neither a clergyman nor a theologian; however, theology, and particularly English Calvinism, formed the palette on which John Milton created his greatest thoughts. John Milton wrestled with the great doctrines of the Church amidst the theological crosswinds of his age. The great poet was undoubtedly Reformed (though his grandfather, Richard "the Ranger" Milton had been Roman Catholic).[80][7] However, Milton's Calvinism had to find expression in a broad-spirited Humanism. Like many Renaissance artists before him, Milton attempted to integrate Christian theology with classical modes. In his early poems, the poet narrator expresses 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.

His use of biblical citation was wide-ranging; Harris Fletcher, standing at the beginning of the intensification of the study of the use of scripture in Milton's work (poetry and prose, in all languages Milton mastered), notes that typically Milton clipped and adapted biblical quotations to suit the purpose, giving precise chapter and verse only in texts for a more specialized readership. As for the plenitude of Milton's quotations from scripture, Fletcher comments, "For this work, I have in all actually collated about twenty-five hundred of the five to ten thousand direct Biblical quotations which appear therein".[81] Milton's customary English Bible was the Authorized King James.[82] When citing and writing in other languages, he usually employed the Latin translation by Immanuel Tremellius, though "he was equipped to read the Bible in Latin, in Greek, and in Hebrew, including the Targumim or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, and the Syriac version of the New, together with the available commentaries of those several versions".[81]

Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views. He has been accused of rejecting the Trinity, believing instead that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his sympathy or curiosity was probably engaged by Socinianism: in August 1650 he licensed for publication by William Dugard the Racovian Catechism, based on a non-trinitarian creed.[83][84] Milton's alleged Arianism, like much of his theology, is still subject of debate and controversy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold argued that "In none of his great works is there a passage from which it can be inferred that he was an Arian; and in the very last of his writings he declares that "the doctrine of the Trinity is a plain doctrine in Scripture."[85] In Areopagitica, Milton classified Arians and Socinians as "errorists" and "schismatics" alongside Arminians and Anabaptists.[86] A source has interpreted him as broadly Protestant, if not always easy to locate in a more precise religious category. In 2019, John Rogers stated, "Heretics both, John Milton and Isaac Newton were, as most scholars now agree, Arians."[87][88]

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. He knew at least four commentaries on Genesis: those of John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, David Pareus and Andreus Rivetus.[89]

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. Milton, however, would later criticise the "worldly" millenarian views of these and others, and expressed orthodox ideas on the prophecy of the Four Empires.[90]

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 may allegorically reflect Milton's view of England's recent Fall from Grace, while Samson's blindness and captivity—mirroring Milton's own lost sight—may be a metaphor for England's blind acceptance of Charles II as king. Illustrated by Paradise Lost is mortalism, the belief that the soul lies dormant after the body dies.[91]

Despite the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton did not lose his personal 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.

Though he maintained his personal faith in spite of the defeats suffered by his cause, the Dictionary of National Biography recounted how he had been alienated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud, and then moved similarly from the Dissenters by their denunciation of religious tolerance in England.

Milton had come to stand apart from all sects, though apparently finding the Quakers most congenial. He never went to any religious services in his later years. When a servant brought back accounts of sermons from nonconformist meetings, Milton became so sarcastic that the man at last gave up his place.

Writing of the enigmatic and often conflicting views of Milton in the Puritan age, David Daiches wrote convincingly,

"Christian and Humanist, Protestant, patriot and heir of the golden ages of Greece and Rome, he faced what appeared to him to be the birth-pangs of a new and regenerate England with high excitement and idealistic optimism.”[62]

A fair theological summary may be: that John Milton was a Puritan, though his tendency to press further for liberty of conscience, sometimes out of conviction and often out of mere intellectual curiosity, made the great man, at least, a vital if not uncomfortable ally in the broader Puritan movement.[64][80]

Religious toleration

Milton called in the Areopagitica for "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" to the conflicting Protestant denominations.[92] According to American historian William Hunter, "Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective way of achieving broad toleration. Rather than force a man's conscience, government should recognise the persuasive force of the gospel."[93]

Divorce

Main article: Milton's divorce tracts

Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643, at the beginning of the English Civil War. In August of that year, he presented his thoughts to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which had been created by the Long Parliament to bring greater reform to the Church of England. The Assembly convened on 1 July against the will of King Charles I.

Milton's thinking on divorce caused him considerable trouble with the authorities. An orthodox Presbyterian view of the time was that Milton's views on divorce constituted a one-man heresy:

The fervently Presbyterian Edwards had included Milton's divorce tracts in his list in Gangraena of heretical publications that threatened the religious and moral fabric of the nation; Milton responded by mocking him as "shallow Edwards" in the satirical sonnet "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament", usually dated to the latter half of 1646.[94]

Even here, though, his originality is qualified: Thomas Gataker had already identified "mutual solace" as a principal goal in marriage.[95] Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimise divorce after 1645, but he expressed support for polygamy in the De Doctrina Christiana, the theological treatise that provides the clearest evidence for his views.[96]

Milton wrote during a period when thoughts about divorce were anything but simplistic; rather, there was active debate among thinkers and intellectuals at the time. However, Milton's basic approval of divorce within strict parameters set by the biblical witness was typical of many influential Christian intellectuals, particularly the Westminster divines. Milton addressed the Assembly on the matter of divorce in August 1643,[97] at a moment when the Assembly was beginning to form its opinion on the matter. In the Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, Milton argued that divorce was a private matter, not a legal or ecclesiastical one. Neither the Assembly nor Parliament condemned Milton or his ideas. In fact, when the Westminster Assembly wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith they allowed for divorce ('Of Marriage and Divorce,' Chapter 24, Section 5) in cases of infidelity or abandonment. Thus, the Christian community, at least a majority within the 'Puritan' sub-set, approved of Milton's views.

Nevertheless, reaction among Puritans to Milton's views on divorce was mixed. Herbert Palmer, a member of the Westminster Assembly, condemned Milton in the strongest possible language:

If any plead Conscience ... for divorce for other causes than Christ and His Apostles mention; Of which a wicked booke is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author, hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves ... will you grant a Toleration for all this?

— The Glasse of God's Providence Towards His Faithfull Ones, 1644, p. 54.[98]

Palmer expressed his disapproval in a sermon addressed to the Westminster Assembly. The Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie described Palmer's sermon as one "of the most Scottish and free sermons that ever I heard any where."[99]

History

History was particularly important for the political class of the period, and Lewalski considers that Milton "more than most illustrates" a remark of Thomas Hobbes on the weight placed at the time on the classical Latin historical writers Tacitus, Livy, Sallust and Cicero, and their republican attitudes.[100] Milton himself wrote that "Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters", in Book II of his History of Britain. A sense of history mattered greatly to him:[101]

The course of human history, the immediate impact of the civil disorders, and his own traumatic personal life, are all regarded by Milton as typical of the predicament he describes as "the misery that has bin since Adam".[102]

Legacy and influence

Once Paradise Lost was published, Milton's stature as epic poet was immediately recognised. He 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. Very early on, though, he was championed by Whigs, and decried by Tories: with the regicide Edmund Ludlow he was claimed as an early Whig,[103] while the High Tory Anglican minister Luke Milbourne lumped Milton in with other "Agents of Darkness" such as John Knox, George Buchanan, Richard Baxter, Algernon Sidney and John Locke.[104] The political ideas of Milton, Locke, Sidney, and James Harrington strongly influenced the Radical Whigs, whose ideology in turn was central to the American Revolution.[105] Modern scholars of Milton's life, politics, and work are known as Miltonists: "his work is the subject of a very large amount of academic scholarship".[106]

In 2008, John Milton Passage, a short passage by Bread Street into St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard in London, was unveiled.[107]

Early reception of the poetry

 
Title page of a 1752–1761 edition of "The Poetical Works of John Milton with Notes of Various Authors by Thomas Newton" printed by J. & R. Tonson in the Strand

John Dryden, an early enthusiast, in 1677 began the trend of describing Milton as the poet of the sublime.[108] Dryden's The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man: an Opera (1677) is evidence of an immediate cultural influence. In 1695, Patrick Hume became the first editor of Paradise Lost, providing an extensive apparatus of annotation and commentary, particularly chasing down allusions.[109]

In 1732, the classical scholar Richard Bentley offered a corrected version of Paradise Lost.[110] Bentley was considered presumptuous, and was attacked in the following year by Zachary Pearce. Christopher Ricks judges that, as critic, Bentley was both acute and wrong-headed, and "incorrigibly eccentric"; William Empson also finds Pearce to be more sympathetic to Bentley's underlying line of thought than is warranted.[111][112]

There was an early, partial translation of Paradise Lost into German by Theodore Haak, and based on that a standard verse translation by Ernest Gottlieb von Berge. A subsequent prose translation by Johann Jakob Bodmer was very popular; it influenced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. The German-language Milton tradition returned to England in the person of the artist Henry Fuseli.

Many Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century revered and commented on Milton's poetry and non-poetical works. In addition to John Dryden, among them were Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Thomas Newton, and Samuel Johnson. For example, in The Spectator,[113] Joseph Addison wrote extensive notes, annotations, and interpretations of certain passages of Paradise Lost. Jonathan Richardson, senior, and Jonathan Richardson, the younger, co-wrote a book of criticism.[114] In 1749, Thomas Newton published an extensive edition of Milton's poetical works with annotations provided by himself, Dryden, Pope, Addison, the Richardsons (father and son) and others. Newton's edition of Milton was a culmination of the honour bestowed upon Milton by early Enlightenment thinkers; it may also have been prompted by Richard Bentley's infamous edition, described above. Samuel Johnson wrote numerous essays on Paradise Lost, and Milton was included in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). In The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire said "Milton remains the glory and the wonder (l'admiration) of England."[115]

Blake

William Blake considered Milton the major English poet. Blake placed Edmund Spenser as Milton's precursor, and saw himself as Milton's poetical son.[116] In his Milton: A Poem in Two Books, Blake uses Milton as a character.

Romantic theory

Edmund Burke was a theorist of the sublime, and he regarded Milton's description of Hell as exemplary of sublimity as an aesthetic concept. For Burke, it was to set alongside mountain-tops, a storm at sea, and infinity.[117] In The Beautiful and the Sublime, he wrote: "No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton."[118]

The Romantic poets valued his exploration of blank verse, but for the most part rejected his religiosity. William Wordsworth began his sonnet "London, 1802" with "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour"[119] and modelled The Prelude, his own blank verse epic, on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton's style uncongenial;[120] he exclaimed that "Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour."[121] Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a "beautiful and grand curiosity", but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry, Hyperion, was unsatisfactory to the author because, amongst other things, it had too many "Miltonic inversions".[121] In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is, in the view of many critics, "one of the key 'Romantic' readings of Paradise Lost."[122]

Later legacy

The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton's influence. Thomas Carlyle declared him the "moral king of English literature,"[123] while George Eliot[124] and Thomas Hardy were particularly inspired by Milton's poetry and biography. Hostile 20th-century criticism by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did not reduce Milton's stature.[125] F. R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit, responded to the points made by Eliot, in particular the claim that "the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance", by arguing, "As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton! The problem, rather, was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized, belonging, as it did, to the climate of the habitual and 'natural'."[126] Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, wrote that "Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English [...]".[127]

Milton's Areopagitica is still cited as relevant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[128] A 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 displayed in many public libraries, including the New York Public Library.

The title of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is derived from a quotation, "His dark materials to create more worlds", line 915 of Book II in Paradise Lost. Pullman was concerned to produce a version of Milton's poem accessible to teenagers,[129] and has spoken of Milton as "our greatest public poet".[130]

Titles of a number of other well-known literary works are also derived from Milton's writings. Examples include Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and William Golding's Darkness Visible.[131]

T. S. Eliot believed that "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions... making unlawful entry".[132]

Literary legacy

 
Milton is commemorated in the temple of British Worthies, Stowe, Buckinghamshire

Milton's use of blank verse, in addition to his stylistic innovations (such as grandiloquence of voice and vision, peculiar diction and phraseology) influenced later poets. At the time, poetic blank verse was considered distinct from its use in verse drama, and Paradise Lost was taken as a unique exemplar.[133] Said Isaac Watts in 1734, "Mr. Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us".[134] "Miltonic verse" might be synonymous for a century with blank verse as poetry, a new poetic terrain independent from both the drama and the heroic couplet.

Lack of rhyme was sometimes taken as Milton's defining innovation. He himself considered the rhymeless quality of Paradise Lost to be an extension of his own personal liberty:

This neglect then of Rhime ... is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.[135]

This pursuit of freedom was largely a reaction against conservative values entrenched within the rigid heroic couplet.[136] Within a dominant culture that stressed elegance and finish, he granted primacy to freedom, breadth and imaginative suggestiveness, eventually developed into the romantic vision of sublime terror. Reaction to Milton's poetic worldview included, grudgingly, acknowledgement that of poet's resemblance to classical writers (Greek and Roman poetry being unrhymed). Blank verse came to be a recognised medium for religious works and for translations of the classics. Unrhymed lyrics like Collins' Ode to Evening (in the meter of Milton's translation of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha) were not uncommon after 1740.[137]

A second aspect of Milton's blank verse was the use of unconventional rhythm:

His blank-verse paragraph, and his audacious and victorious attempt to combine blank and rhymed verse with paragraphic effect in Lycidas, lay down indestructible models and patterns of English verse-rhythm, as distinguished from the narrower and more strait-laced forms of English metre.[138]

Before Milton, "the sense of regular rhythm ... had been knocked into the English head so securely that it was part of their nature".[139] The "Heroick measure", according to Samuel Johnson, "is pure ... when the accent rests upon every second syllable through the whole line ... The repetition of this sound or percussion at equal times, is the most complete harmony of which a single verse is capable".[140] Caesural pauses, most agreed, were best placed at the middle and the end of the line. In order to support this symmetry, lines were most often octo- or deca-syllabic, with no enjambed endings. To this schema Milton introduced modifications, which included hypermetrical syllables (trisyllabic feet), inversion or slighting of stresses, and the shifting of pauses to all parts of the line.[141] Milton deemed these features to be reflective of "the transcendental union of order and freedom".[142] Admirers remained hesitant to adopt such departures from traditional metrical schemes: "The English ... had been writing separate lines for so long that they could not rid themselves of the habit".[143] Isaac Watts preferred his lines distinct from each other, as did Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Pemberton, and Scott of Amwell, whose general opinion it was that Milton's frequent omission of the initial unaccented foot was "displeasing to a nice ear".[144] It was not until the late 18th century that poets (beginning with Gray) began to appreciate "the composition of Milton's harmony ... how he loved to vary his pauses, his measures, and his feet, which gives that enchanting air of freedom and wilderness to his versification".[145] By the 20th century, American poet and critic John Hollander would go so far as to say that Milton "was able, by plying that most remarkable instrument of English meter ... to invent a new mode of image-making in English poetry."[146]

Milton's pursuit of liberty extended into his vocabulary as well. It included many Latinate neologisms, as well as obsolete words already dropped from popular usage so completely that their meanings were no longer understood. In 1740, Francis Peck identified some examples of Milton's "old" words (now popular).[147] The "Miltonian dialect", as it was called, was emulated by later poets; Pope used the diction of Paradise Lost in his Homer translation, while the lyric poetry of Gray and Collins was frequently criticised for their use of "obsolete words out of Spenser and Milton".[148] The language of Thomson's finest poems (e.g. The Seasons, The Castle of Indolence) was self-consciously modelled after the Miltonian dialect, with the same tone and sensibilities as Paradise Lost. Following to Milton, English poetry from Pope to John Keats exhibited a steadily increasing attention to the connotative, the imaginative and poetic, value of words.[149]

Musical settings

Milton's ode At a solemn Musick was set for choir and orchestra as Blest Pair of Sirens by Hubert Parry (1848–1918), and Milton's poem On the Morning of Christ's Nativity was set as a large-scale choral work by Cyril Rootham (1875–1938). Milton also wrote the hymn Let us with a gladsome mind, a versification of Psalm 136. His 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', with additional material, were magnificently set by Handel (1740).

Works

Poetry and drama

Prose

Notes

  1. ^ "When I consider how my light is spent" is one of the best known of Milton's sonnets. The last three lines (concluding with "They also serve who only stand and wait") are particularly well known, though rarely in context. The poem may have been written as early as 1652, although most scholars believe it was composed sometime between June and October 1655, when Milton's blindness was essentially complete.

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  69. ^ Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (1982), p. 34.
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  74. ^ To S r Henry Vane the younger. – The Poetical Works of John Milton.
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  133. ^ Saintsbury 1908 ii. 443.
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  137. ^ Dexter 1922 p. 46.
  138. ^ Saintsbury 1908 ii. 457.
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  140. ^ Johnson 1751 no. 86.
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  145. ^ Gray 1748 Observations on English Metre.
  146. ^ Hollander, John (1975). Vision and resonance : two senses of poetic form. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 116. ISBN 0195018982. OCLC 1530446.
  147. ^ They included "self-same", "hue", "minstrelsy", "murky", "carol", and "chaunt". Among Milton's naturalized Latin words were "humid", "orient", "hostil", "facil", "fervid", "jubilant", "ire", "bland", "reluctant", "palpable", "fragil", and "ornate". Peck 1740 pp. 110–111.
  148. ^ Scott 1785 63.
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January 26, 2023
john, milton, other, people, named, disambiguation, december, 1608, november, 1674, english, poet, intellectual, 1667, epic, poem, paradise, lost, written, blank, verse, including, over, chapters, written, time, immense, religious, flux, political, upheaval, a. For other people named John Milton see John Milton disambiguation John Milton 9 December 1608 8 November 1674 was an English poet and intellectual His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost written in blank verse and including over ten chapters was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval It addressed the fall of man including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God s expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden Paradise Lost is widely considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written and it elevated Milton s widely held reputation as one of history s greatest poets 1 2 He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell John MiltonPortrait of Milton c 1629Born 1608 12 09 9 December 1608Bread Street Cheapside London EnglandDied8 November 1674 1674 11 08 aged 65 Bunhill Row London EnglandResting placeSt Giles without CripplegateAlma materChrist s College CambridgeOccupationsPoetIntellectualCivil ServantSpouse s Mary Powell m 1642 died 1652 wbr Katherine Woodcock m 1656 died 1658 wbr Elizabeth Mynshull m 1663 wbr Children5Writing careerLanguageEnglish Latin Greek Hebrew French Spanish Italian Old English Dutch Aramaic SyriacNotable worksParadise LostAreopagiticaLycidasSignatureWriting in English Latin and Italian Milton achieved global fame and recognition during his lifetime his celebrated Areopagitica 1644 written in condemnation of pre publication censorship is among history s most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in his style which included his introduction of new words coined from Latin and Ancient Greek to the English language He was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations Milton is described as the greatest English author by biographer William Hayley 3 and he remains generally regarded as one of the preeminent writers in the English language 4 though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death often on account of his republicanism Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as a poem which with respect to design may claim the first place and with respect to performance the second among the productions of the human mind though he a Tory described Milton s politics as those of an acrimonious and surly republican 5 Milton was revered by poets such as William Blake William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy Phases of Milton s life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart England at the time In his early years Milton studied at Christ s College at the University of Cambridge one of the world s most prestigious universities and then travelled wrote poetry mostly for private circulation and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under Charles I s increasingly autocratic rule and Britain s breakdown into constitutional confusion and ultimately civil war While once considered dangerously radical and heretical Milton contributed to a seismic shift in accepted public opinions during his life that ultimately elevated him to public office in England The Restoration of 1660 and his loss of vision later deprived Milton much of his public platform but he used the period to develop many of his major works Milton s views developed from extensive reading travel and experience that began with his days as a student at Cambridge in the 1620s and continued through the English Civil War which started in 1642 and continued through 1651 6 By the time of his death in 1674 Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life but famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for political choices that placed him at odds with governing authorities Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Study poetry and travel 3 Civil war prose tracts and marriage 4 Secretary for Foreign Tongues 5 The Restoration 6 Death 7 Family 8 Poetry 8 1 Paradise Lost 9 Views 9 1 Philosophy 9 2 Political thought 9 3 Theology 9 4 Religious toleration 9 5 Divorce 9 6 History 10 Legacy and influence 10 1 Early reception of the poetry 10 2 Blake 10 3 Romantic theory 10 4 Later legacy 10 5 Literary legacy 10 6 Musical settings 11 Works 11 1 Poetry and drama 11 2 Prose 12 Notes 13 References 14 Sources 15 External linksEarly life and education EditMain article Early life of John Milton Blue plaque on London s Bread Street commemorating Milton s birthplace Portrait of Milton at age 10 in Milton s Cottage Chalfont St Giles painted by Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen John Milton was born in Bread Street London on 9 December 1608 the son of composer John Milton and his wife Sarah Jeffrey The senior John Milton 1562 1647 moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father Richard the Ranger Milton for embracing Protestantism 7 In London the senior John Milton married Sarah Jeffrey 1572 1637 and found lasting financial success as a scrivener 8 He lived in and worked from a house in Cheapside at Bread Street where the Mermaid Tavern was located The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a musical composer and this talent left his son with a lifelong appreciation for music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes 9 The prosperity of Milton s father allowed his eldest son to obtain a private tutor Thomas Young a Scottish Presbyterian with a MA from the University of St Andrews Young s influence also served as the poet s introduction to religious radicalism 10 After Young s tutorship Milton attended St Paul s School in London where he began the study of Latin and Greek the classical languages left an imprint on both his poetry and prose in English he also wrote in Latin and Italian Milton s first datable compositions are two psalms written at age 15 at Long Bennington One contemporary source is Brief Lives of John Aubrey an uneven compilation including first hand reports In the work Aubrey quotes Christopher Milton s younger brother When he was young he studied very hard and sat up very late commonly till twelve or one o clock at night Aubrey adds His complexion exceeding faire he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ s College 11 In 1625 Milton gained entry to Christ s College at the University of Cambridge where he graduated with a BA in 1629 12 ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year in the University of Cambridge 13 Then preparing to become an Anglican priest Milton then pursued his Master of Arts degree at Cambridge which he received on 3 July 1632 Milton may have been rusticated suspended in his first year at Cambridge for quarrelling with his tutor Bishop William Chappell He was certainly at home in London in the Lent Term 1626 there he wrote Elegia Prima his first Latin elegy to Charles Diodati a friend from St Paul s Based on remarks of John Aubrey Chappell whipt Milton 11 This story is now disputed though certainly Milton disliked Chappell 14 Historian Christopher Hill notes that Milton was apparently rusticated and that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal 15 It is also possible that like Isaac Newton four decades later Milton was sent home from Cambridge because of the plague which impacted Cambridge significantly in 1625 At Cambridge Milton was on good terms with Edward King he later dedicated Lycidas to him Milton also befriended Anglo American dissident and theologian Roger Williams Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch 16 better source needed Despite developing a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition Milton suffered from alienation among his peers during his time at Cambridge Having once watched his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage he later observed they thought themselves gallant men and I thought them fools 17 Milton also was disdainful of the university curriculum which consisted of stilted formal debates conducted in Latin on abstruse topics His own corpus is not devoid of humour notably his sixth prolusion and his epitaphs on the death of Thomas Hobson While at Cambridge he wrote a number of his well known shorter English poems including On the Morning of Christ s Nativity Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet W Shakespeare his first poem to appear in print L Allegro and Il Penseroso Study poetry and travel EditFurther information Early life of John Milton It appears in all his writings that he had the usual concomitant of great abilities a lofty and steady confidence in himself perhaps not without some contempt of others for scarcely any man ever wrote so much and praised so few Of his praise he was very frugal as he set its value high and considered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of time and a certain preservative from oblivion 18 Samuel Johnson Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets Upon receiving his M A in 1632 Milton retired to Hammersmith his father s new home since the previous year He also lived at Horton Berkshire from 1635 and undertook six years of self directed private study Hill argues that this was not retreat into a rural idyll Hammersmith was then a suburban village falling into the orbit of London and even Horton was becoming deforested and suffered from the plague 19 He read both ancient and modern works of theology philosophy history politics literature and science in preparation for a prospective poetical career Milton s intellectual development can be charted via entries in his commonplace book like a scrapbook 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 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 20 Commemorative blue plaque John Milton lived here 1632 1638 at Berkyn Manor Farm Horton Berkshire Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study his Arcades and Comus were both commissioned for masques composed for noble patrons connections of the Egerton family and performed in 1632 and 1634 respectively Comus argues for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity He contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for one of his fellow students at Cambridge 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 In May 1638 accompanied by a manservant Milton embarked upon a tour of France and Italy for 15 months that lasted until July or August 1639 21 His travels supplemented his study with new and direct experience of artistic and religious traditions especially Roman Catholicism He met famous theorists and intellectuals of the time and was able to display his poetic skills For specific details of what happened within Milton s grand tour there appears to be just one primary source Milton s own Defensio Secunda There are other records including some letters and some references in his other prose tracts but the bulk of the information about the tour comes from a work that according to Barbara Lewalski was not intended as autobiography but as rhetoric designed to emphasise his sterling reputation with the learned of Europe 22 He first went to Calais and then on to Paris riding horseback with a letter from diplomat Henry Wotton to ambassador John Scudamore Through Scudamore Milton met Hugo Grotius a Dutch law philosopher playwright and poet Milton left France soon after this meeting He travelled south from Nice to Genoa and then to Livorno and Pisa He reached Florence in July 1638 While there Milton enjoyed many of the sites and structures of the city His candour of manner and erudite neo Latin poetry earned him friends in Florentine intellectual circles and he met the astronomer Galileo who was under house arrest at Arcetri as well as others 23 Milton probably visited the Florentine Academy and the Accademia della Crusca along with smaller academies in the area including the Apatisti and the Svogliati In Florence which I have always admired above all others because of the elegance not just of its tongue but also of its wit I lingered for about two months There I at once became the friend of many gentlemen eminent in rank and learning whose private academies I frequented a Florentine institution which deserves great praise not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse 24 Milton s account of Florence in Defensio Secunda He left Florence in September to continue to Rome With the connections from Florence Milton was able to have easy access to Rome s intellectual society His poetic abilities impressed those like Giovanni Salzilli who praised Milton within an epigram In late October Milton attended a dinner given by the English College Rome despite his dislike for the Society of Jesus meeting English Catholics who were also guests theologian Henry Holden and the poet Patrick Cary 25 He also attended musical events including oratorios operas and melodramas Milton left for Naples toward the end of November where he stayed only for a month because of the Spanish control 26 During that time he was introduced to Giovanni Battista Manso patron to both Torquato Tasso and to Giambattista Marino 27 Originally Milton wanted to leave Naples in order to travel to Sicily and then on to Greece but he returned to England during the summer of 1639 because of what he claimed in Defensio Secunda 28 were sad tidings of civil war in England 29 Matters became more complicated when Milton received word that his childhood friend Diodati had died Milton in fact stayed another seven months on the continent and spent time at Geneva with Diodati s uncle after he returned to Rome In Defensio Secunda Milton proclaimed that he was warned against a return to Rome because of his frankness about religion but he stayed in the city for two months and was able to experience Carnival and meet Lukas Holste a Vatican librarian who guided Milton through its collection He was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini who invited Milton to an opera hosted by the Cardinal Around March Milton travelled once again to Florence staying there for two months attending further meetings of the academies and spending time with friends After leaving Florence he travelled through Lucca Bologna and Ferrara before coming to Venice In Venice Milton was exposed to a model of Republicanism later important in his political writings but he soon found another model when he travelled to Geneva From Switzerland Milton travelled to Paris and then to Calais before finally arriving back in England in either July or August 1639 30 Civil war prose tracts and marriage EditMain article Milton s antiprelatical tracts Title page of the 1644 edition of Areopagitica On returning to England where the Bishops Wars presaged further armed conflict Milton began to write prose tracts against episcopacy 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 defences of Smectymnuus a group of Presbyterian divines named from their initials the TY belonged to Milton s old tutor Thomas Young and The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty He vigorously attacked the High church party of the Church of England and their leader William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury with frequent passages of real eloquence lighting up the rough controversial style of the period and deploying a wide knowledge of church history He was supported by his father s investments but Milton became a private schoolmaster at this time educating his nephews and other children of the well to do This experience and discussions with educational reformer Samuel Hartlib led him to write his short tract Of Education in 1644 urging a reform of the national universities In June 1642 Milton paid a visit to the manor house at Forest Hill Oxfordshire and aged 34 married the 17 year old Mary Powell 31 32 The marriage got off to a poor start as Mary did not adapt to Milton s austere lifestyle or get along with his nephews Milton found her intellectually unsatisfying and disliked the royalist views she had absorbed from her family It is also speculated that she refused to consummate the marriage Mary soon returned home to her parents and did not come back until 1645 partly because of the outbreak of the Civil War 31 In the meantime her desertion prompted Milton to publish a series of pamphlets over the next three years arguing for the legality and morality of divorce beyond grounds of adultery Anna Beer one of Milton s most recent biographers as of points to a lack of evidence and the dangers of cynicism in urging that it was not necessarily the case that the private life so animated the public polemicising In 1643 Milton had a brush with the authorities over these writings in parallel with Hezekiah Woodward who had more trouble 33 It was the hostile response accorded the divorce tracts that spurred Milton to write Areopagitica A speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc d Printing to the Parlament of England his celebrated attack on pre printing censorship In Areopagitica Milton aligns himself with the parliamentary cause and he also begins to synthesize the ideal of neo Roman liberty with that of Christian liberty Milton also courted another woman during this time we know nothing of her except that her name was Davis and she turned him down However it was enough to induce Mary Powell into returning to him which she did unexpectedly by begging him to take her back She bore him two daughters in quick succession following their reconciliation 34 35 Secretary for Foreign Tongues EditWith the Parliamentary victory in the Civil War Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 1649 defended the right of the people to hold their rulers to account and implicitly sanctioned the regicide Milton s political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649 His main job description was to compose the English Republic s foreign correspondence in Latin and other languages but he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor 36 The back of no 19 York Street 1848 In 1651 Milton moved into a pretty garden house in Petty France Westminster He lived there until the Restoration Later it became No 19 York Street belonged to Jeremy Bentham was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt and finally was demolished in 1877 37 In October 1649 he published Eikonoklastes an explicit defence 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 later the exiled Charles II and his party published the defence of monarchy Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo written by leading humanist Claudius Salmasius By January of the following year Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State Milton worked more slowly than usual given the European audience and the English Republic s desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy as he drew on the learning marshalled by his years of study to compose a riposte On 24 February 1652 Milton published his Latin defence of the English people Defensio pro Populo Anglicano also known as the First Defence Milton s pure Latin prose and evident learning exemplified in the First Defence quickly made him a European reputation and the work ran to numerous editions 38 He addressed his Sonnet 16 to The Lord Generall Cromwell in May 1652 beginning Cromwell our chief of men although it was not published until 1654 39 In 1654 Milton completed the second defence of the English nation Defensio secunda in response to an anonymous Royalist tract Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides a work that made many personal attacks on Milton 40 The second defence praised Oliver Cromwell now Lord Protector while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution Alexander Morus to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor in fact by Peter du Moulin published an attack on Milton in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655 Milton held the appointment of Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State until 1660 although after he had become totally blind most of the work was done by his deputies Georg Rudolph Wecklein then Philip Meadows and from 1657 by the poet Andrew Marvell 41 By 1652 Milton had become totally blind 42 the cause of his blindness is debated but bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma are most likely 43 His blindness forced him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses who copied them out for him one of these was Andrew Marvell One of his best known sonnets When I Consider How My Light is Spent titled by a later editor John Newton On His Blindness is presumed to date from this period 44 The Restoration Edit Engraving by William Faithorne 1670 Cromwell s death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions Milton however stubbornly clung to the beliefs that had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth In 1659 he published A Treatise of Civil Power attacking the concept of a state dominated church the position known as Erastianism as well as Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings denouncing corrupt practises in church governance As the Republic disintegrated Milton wrote several proposals to retain a non monarchical government against the wishes of parliament soldiers and the people 45 46 A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth written in October 1659 was a response to General Lambert s recent dissolution of the Rump Parliament Proposals of certain expedients for the preventing of a civil war now feared written in November 1659 The Ready and Easy Way to Establishing a Free Commonwealth in two editions responded to General Monck s march towards London to restore the Long Parliament which led to the restoration of the monarchy The work is an impassioned bitter and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty and advocating the establishment of an authoritarian rule by an oligarchy set up by unelected parliament Upon the Restoration in May 1660 Milton fearing for his life went into hiding while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings were burnt He re emerged after a general pardon was issued but was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned before influential friends intervened such as Marvell now an MP Milton married for a third and final time on 24 February 1663 marrying Elizabeth Betty Minshull aged 24 a native of Wistaston Cheshire He spent the remaining decade of his life living quietly in London only retiring to a cottage during the Great Plague of London Milton s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles his only extant home During this period Milton published several minor prose works such as the grammar textbook Art of Logic and a 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 were referred to in the Exclusion debate the attempt to exclude the heir presumptive from the throne of England James Duke of York because he was Roman Catholic That debate preoccupied politics in the 1670s and 1680s and precipitated the formation of the Whig party and the Glorious Revolution Death Edit Milton s statue and memorial in St Giles without Cripplegate church London Milton died on 8 November 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles without Cripplegate Fore Street London 47 However sources differ as to whether the cause of death was consumption or gout 47 48 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 49 A monument was added in 1793 sculpted by John Bacon the Elder Family EditMilton and his first wife Mary Powell 1625 1652 had four children 50 Anne born 29 July 1646 Mary born 25 October 1648 John 16 March 1651 June 1652 Deborah 2 May 1652 10 August 1727 51 Mary Powell died on 5 May 1652 from complications following Deborah s birth Milton s daughters survived to adulthood but he always had a strained relationship with them On 12 November 1656 Milton was married to Katherine Woodcock at St Margaret s Westminster 52 She died on 3 February 1658 less than four months after giving birth to her daughter Katherine who also died Milton married for a third time on 24 February 1663 to Elizabeth Mynshull or Minshull 1638 1728 the niece of Thomas Mynshull a wealthy apothecary and philanthropist in Manchester The marriage took place at St Mary Aldermary in the City of London Despite a 31 year age gap the marriage seemed happy according to John Aubrey and lasted more than 12 years until Milton s death A plaque on the wall of Mynshull s House in Manchester describes Elizabeth as Milton s 3rd and Best wife Samuel Johnson however claims that Mynshull was a domestic companion and attendant and that Milton s nephew Edward Phillips relates that Mynshull oppressed his children in his lifetime and cheated them at his death 53 His nephews Edward and John Phillips sons of Milton s sister Anne were educated by Milton and became writers themselves John acted as a secretary and Edward was Milton s first biographer Poetry EditMilton s poetry was slow to see the light of day at least under his name His first published poem was On Shakespeare 1630 anonymously included in the Second Folio edition of William Shakespeare s plays in 1632 An annotated copy of the First Folio has been suggested to contain marginal notes by Milton 54 Milton collected his work in 1645 Poems in the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government The anonymous edition of Comus was published in 1637 and the publication of Lycidas in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago was signed J M Otherwise The 1645 collection was the only poetry of his to see print until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667 Paradise Lost Edit Main article Paradise Lost Milton Dictates the Lost Paradise to His Three Daughters ca 1826 by Eugene Delacroix Milton s magnum opus the blank verse epic poem Paradise Lost was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 first edition with small but significant revisions published in 1674 second edition As a blind poet Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ It has been argued that the poem reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential Some literary critics have argued that Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the Good Old Cause 55 On 27 April 1667 56 Milton sold the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for 5 equivalent to approximately 770 in 2015 purchasing power 57 with a further 5 to be paid if and when each print run sold out of between 1 300 and 1 500 copies 58 The first run was a quarto edition priced at three shillings per copy about 23 in 2015 purchasing power equivalent published in August 1667 and it sold out in eighteen months 59 Milton followed up the publication Paradise Lost with its sequel Paradise Regained which was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671 Both of these works also reflect Milton s post Restoration political situation Just before his death in 1674 Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost accompanied by an explanation of why the poem rhymes not and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell In 1673 Milton republished his 1645 Poems as well as a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days Views EditAn unfinished religious manifesto De doctrina christiana probably written by Milton lays out many of his heterodox theological views and was not discovered and published until 1823 Milton s key beliefs were idiosyncratic not those of an identifiable group or faction and often they go well beyond the orthodoxy of the time Their tone however stemmed from the Puritan emphasis on the centrality and inviolability of conscience 60 He was his own man but he was anticipated by Henry Robinson in Areopagitica clarification needed Philosophy Edit While Milton s beliefs are generally considered to be consistent with Protestant Christianity Stephen Fallon argues that by the late 1650s Milton may have at least toyed with the idea 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 61 Fallon claims that Milton devised this position to avoid the mind body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes According to Fallon Milton s monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat 5 433 439 clarification needed and apparently engage in sexual intercourse 8 622 629 clarification needed and the De Doctrina where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo Political thought Edit Main article John Milton s politicsMilton was a passionately individual Christian Humanist poet 62 He appears on the pages of seventeenth century English Puritanism an age characterized as the world turned upside down 63 He was a Puritan and yet was unwilling to surrender conscience to party positions on public policy Thus Milton s political thought driven by competing convictions a Reformed faith and a Humanist spirit led to enigmatic outcomes Milton s apparently contradictory stance on the vital problems of his age arose from religious contestations to the questions of the divine rights of kings In both the cases he seems in control taking stock of the situation arising from the polarization of the English society on religious and political lines He fought with the Puritans against the Cavaliers i e the King s party and helped win the day But the very same constitutional and republican polity when tried to curtail freedom of speech Milton given his humanistic zeal wrote Areopagitica sic 64 Title page of John Milton s 1644 edition of Areopagitica Areopagitica was written in response to the Licensing Order in November 1644 65 Milton s political thought may be best categorized according to respective periods in his life and times The years 1641 42 were dedicated to church politics and the struggle against episcopacy After his divorce writings Areopagitica and a gap he wrote in 1649 54 in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I and in polemic justification of the regicide and the existing Parliamentarian regime Then in 1659 60 he foresaw the Restoration and wrote to head it off 66 Milton s own beliefs were in some cases unpopular particularly his commitment to republicanism In coming centuries Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism 67 According to James Tully with Locke as with Milton republican and contraction conceptions of political freedom join hands in common opposition to the disengaged and passive subjection offered by absolutists such as Hobbes and Robert Filmer 68 A friend and ally in the pamphlet wars was Marchamont Nedham Austin Woolrych considers that although they were quite close there is little real affinity beyond a broad republicanism between their approaches 69 Blair Worden remarks that both Milton and Nedham with others such as Andrew Marvell and James Harrington would have taken their problem with the Rump Parliament to be not the republic itself but the fact that it was not a proper republic 70 Woolrych speaks of the gulf between Milton s vision of the Commonwealth s future and the reality 71 In the early version of his History of Britain begun in 1649 Milton was already writing off the members of the Long Parliament as incorrigible 72 He praised Oliver Cromwell as the Protectorate was set up though subsequently he had major reservations When Cromwell seemed to be backsliding as a revolutionary after a couple of years in power Milton moved closer to the position of Sir Henry Vane to whom he wrote a sonnet in 1652 73 74 The group of disaffected republicans included besides Vane John Bradshaw John Hutchinson Edmund Ludlow Henry Marten Robert Overton Edward Sexby and John Streater but not Marvell who remained with Cromwell s party 75 Milton had already commended Overton along with Edmund Whalley and Bulstrode Whitelocke in Defensio Secunda 76 Nigel Smith writes that John Streater and the form of republicanism he stood for was a fulfilment of Milton s most optimistic ideas of free speech and of public heroism 77 As Richard Cromwell fell from power he envisaged a step towards a freer republic or free commonwealth writing in the hope of this outcome in early 1660 Milton had argued for an awkward position in the Ready and Easy Way because he wanted to invoke the Good Old Cause and gain the support of the republicans but without offering a democratic solution of any kind 78 His proposal backed by reference amongst other reasons to the oligarchical Dutch and Venetian constitutions was for a council with perpetual membership This attitude cut right across the grain of popular opinion of the time which swung decisively behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy that took place later in the year 79 Milton an associate of and advocate on behalf of the regicides was silenced on political matters as Charles II returned Theology Edit Main article John Milton s religion Milton was neither a clergyman nor a theologian however theology and particularly English Calvinism formed the palette on which John Milton created his greatest thoughts John Milton wrestled with the great doctrines of the Church amidst the theological crosswinds of his age The great poet was undoubtedly Reformed though his grandfather Richard the Ranger Milton had been Roman Catholic 80 7 However Milton s Calvinism had to find expression in a broad spirited Humanism Like many Renaissance artists before him Milton attempted to integrate Christian theology with classical modes In his early poems the poet narrator expresses 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 His use of biblical citation was wide ranging Harris Fletcher standing at the beginning of the intensification of the study of the use of scripture in Milton s work poetry and prose in all languages Milton mastered notes that typically Milton clipped and adapted biblical quotations to suit the purpose giving precise chapter and verse only in texts for a more specialized readership As for the plenitude of Milton s quotations from scripture Fletcher comments For this work I have in all actually collated about twenty five hundred of the five to ten thousand direct Biblical quotations which appear therein 81 Milton s customary English Bible was the Authorized King James 82 When citing and writing in other languages he usually employed the Latin translation by Immanuel Tremellius though he was equipped to read the Bible in Latin in Greek and in Hebrew including the Targumim or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament and the Syriac version of the New together with the available commentaries of those several versions 81 Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views He has been accused of rejecting the Trinity believing instead that the Son was subordinate to the Father a position known as Arianism and his sympathy or curiosity was probably engaged by Socinianism in August 1650 he licensed for publication by William Dugard the Racovian Catechism based on a non trinitarian creed 83 84 Milton s alleged Arianism like much of his theology is still subject of debate and controversy Rufus Wilmot Griswold argued that In none of his great works is there a passage from which it can be inferred that he was an Arian and in the very last of his writings he declares that the doctrine of the Trinity is a plain doctrine in Scripture 85 In Areopagitica Milton classified Arians and Socinians as errorists and schismatics alongside Arminians and Anabaptists 86 A source has interpreted him as broadly Protestant if not always easy to locate in a more precise religious category In 2019 John Rogers stated Heretics both John Milton and Isaac Newton were as most scholars now agree Arians 87 88 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 He knew at least four commentaries on Genesis those of John Calvin Paulus Fagius David Pareus and Andreus Rivetus 89 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 Milton however would later criticise the worldly millenarian views of these and others and expressed orthodox ideas on the prophecy of the Four Empires 90 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 may allegorically reflect Milton s view of England s recent Fall from Grace while Samson s blindness and captivity mirroring Milton s own lost sight may be a metaphor for England s blind acceptance of Charles II as king Illustrated by Paradise Lost is mortalism the belief that the soul lies dormant after the body dies 91 Despite the Restoration of the monarchy Milton did not lose his personal 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 Though he maintained his personal faith in spite of the defeats suffered by his cause the Dictionary of National Biography recounted how he had been alienated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud and then moved similarly from the Dissenters by their denunciation of religious tolerance in England Milton had come to stand apart from all sects though apparently finding the Quakers most congenial He never went to any religious services in his later years When a servant brought back accounts of sermons from nonconformist meetings Milton became so sarcastic that the man at last gave up his place Writing of the enigmatic and often conflicting views of Milton in the Puritan age David Daiches wrote convincingly Christian and Humanist Protestant patriot and heir of the golden ages of Greece and Rome he faced what appeared to him to be the birth pangs of a new and regenerate England with high excitement and idealistic optimism 62 A fair theological summary may be that John Milton was a Puritan though his tendency to press further for liberty of conscience sometimes out of conviction and often out of mere intellectual curiosity made the great man at least a vital if not uncomfortable ally in the broader Puritan movement 64 80 Religious toleration Edit Milton called in the Areopagitica for the liberty to know to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties to the conflicting Protestant denominations 92 According to American historian William Hunter Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective way of achieving broad toleration Rather than force a man s conscience government should recognise the persuasive force of the gospel 93 Divorce Edit Main article Milton s divorce tracts Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643 at the beginning of the English Civil War In August of that year he presented his thoughts to the Westminster Assembly of Divines which had been created by the Long Parliament to bring greater reform to the Church of England The Assembly convened on 1 July against the will of King Charles I Milton s thinking on divorce caused him considerable trouble with the authorities An orthodox Presbyterian view of the time was that Milton s views on divorce constituted a one man heresy The fervently Presbyterian Edwards had included Milton s divorce tracts in his list in Gangraena of heretical publications that threatened the religious and moral fabric of the nation Milton responded by mocking him as shallow Edwards in the satirical sonnet On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament usually dated to the latter half of 1646 94 Even here though his originality is qualified Thomas Gataker had already identified mutual solace as a principal goal in marriage 95 Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimise divorce after 1645 but he expressed support for polygamy in the De Doctrina Christiana the theological treatise that provides the clearest evidence for his views 96 Milton wrote during a period when thoughts about divorce were anything but simplistic rather there was active debate among thinkers and intellectuals at the time However Milton s basic approval of divorce within strict parameters set by the biblical witness was typical of many influential Christian intellectuals particularly the Westminster divines Milton addressed the Assembly on the matter of divorce in August 1643 97 at a moment when the Assembly was beginning to form its opinion on the matter In the Doctrine amp Discipline of Divorce Milton argued that divorce was a private matter not a legal or ecclesiastical one Neither the Assembly nor Parliament condemned Milton or his ideas In fact when the Westminster Assembly wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith they allowed for divorce Of Marriage and Divorce Chapter 24 Section 5 in cases of infidelity or abandonment Thus the Christian community at least a majority within the Puritan sub set approved of Milton s views Nevertheless reaction among Puritans to Milton s views on divorce was mixed Herbert Palmer a member of the Westminster Assembly condemned Milton in the strongest possible language If any plead Conscience for divorce for other causes than Christ and His Apostles mention Of which a wicked booke is abroad and uncensured though deserving to be burnt whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it and dedicate it to your selves will you grant a Toleration for all this The Glasse of God s Providence Towards His Faithfull Ones 1644 p 54 98 Palmer expressed his disapproval in a sermon addressed to the Westminster Assembly The Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie described Palmer s sermon as one of the most Scottish and free sermons that ever I heard any where 99 History Edit History was particularly important for the political class of the period and Lewalski considers that Milton more than most illustrates a remark of Thomas Hobbes on the weight placed at the time on the classical Latin historical writers Tacitus Livy Sallust and Cicero and their republican attitudes 100 Milton himself wrote that Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters in Book II of his History of Britain A sense of history mattered greatly to him 101 The course of human history the immediate impact of the civil disorders and his own traumatic personal life are all regarded by Milton as typical of the predicament he describes as the misery that has bin since Adam 102 Legacy and influence EditOnce Paradise Lost was published Milton s stature as epic poet was immediately recognised He 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 Very early on though he was championed by Whigs and decried by Tories with the regicide Edmund Ludlow he was claimed as an early Whig 103 while the High Tory Anglican minister Luke Milbourne lumped Milton in with other Agents of Darkness such as John Knox George Buchanan Richard Baxter Algernon Sidney and John Locke 104 The political ideas of Milton Locke Sidney and James Harrington strongly influenced the Radical Whigs whose ideology in turn was central to the American Revolution 105 Modern scholars of Milton s life politics and work are known as Miltonists his work is the subject of a very large amount of academic scholarship 106 In 2008 John Milton Passage a short passage by Bread Street into St Mary le Bow Churchyard in London was unveiled 107 Early reception of the poetry Edit Title page of a 1752 1761 edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton with Notes of Various Authors by Thomas Newton printed by J amp R Tonson in the Strand John Dryden an early enthusiast in 1677 began the trend of describing Milton as the poet of the sublime 108 Dryden s The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man an Opera 1677 is evidence of an immediate cultural influence In 1695 Patrick Hume became the first editor of Paradise Lost providing an extensive apparatus of annotation and commentary particularly chasing down allusions 109 In 1732 the classical scholar Richard Bentley offered a corrected version of Paradise Lost 110 Bentley was considered presumptuous and was attacked in the following year by Zachary Pearce Christopher Ricks judges that as critic Bentley was both acute and wrong headed and incorrigibly eccentric William Empson also finds Pearce to be more sympathetic to Bentley s underlying line of thought than is warranted 111 112 There was an early partial translation of Paradise Lost into German by Theodore Haak and based on that a standard verse translation by Ernest Gottlieb von Berge A subsequent prose translation by Johann Jakob Bodmer was very popular it influenced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock The German language Milton tradition returned to England in the person of the artist Henry Fuseli Many Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century revered and commented on Milton s poetry and non poetical works In addition to John Dryden among them were Alexander Pope Joseph Addison Thomas Newton and Samuel Johnson For example in The Spectator 113 Joseph Addison wrote extensive notes annotations and interpretations of certain passages of Paradise Lost Jonathan Richardson senior and Jonathan Richardson the younger co wrote a book of criticism 114 In 1749 Thomas Newton published an extensive edition of Milton s poetical works with annotations provided by himself Dryden Pope Addison the Richardsons father and son and others Newton s edition of Milton was a culmination of the honour bestowed upon Milton by early Enlightenment thinkers it may also have been prompted by Richard Bentley s infamous edition described above Samuel Johnson wrote numerous essays on Paradise Lost and Milton was included in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets 1779 1781 In The Age of Louis XIV Voltaire said Milton remains the glory and the wonder l admiration of England 115 Blake Edit Frontispiece to Milton A Poem in Two Books William Blake considered Milton the major English poet Blake placed Edmund Spenser as Milton s precursor and saw himself as Milton s poetical son 116 In his Milton A Poem in Two Books Blake uses Milton as a character Romantic theory Edit Edmund Burke was a theorist of the sublime and he regarded Milton s description of Hell as exemplary of sublimity as an aesthetic concept For Burke it was to set alongside mountain tops a storm at sea and infinity 117 In The Beautiful and the Sublime he wrote No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening or of setting terrible things if I may use the expression in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton 118 The Romantic poets valued his exploration of blank verse but for the most part rejected his religiosity William Wordsworth began his sonnet London 1802 with Milton thou should st be living at this hour 119 and modelled The Prelude his own blank verse epic on Paradise Lost John Keats found the yoke of Milton s style uncongenial 120 he exclaimed that Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist s humour 121 Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a beautiful and grand curiosity but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry Hyperion was unsatisfactory to the author because amongst other things it had too many Miltonic inversions 121 In The Madwoman in the Attic Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that Mary Shelley s novel Frankenstein is in the view of many critics one of the key Romantic readings of Paradise Lost 122 Later legacy Edit The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton s influence Thomas Carlyle declared him the moral king of English literature 123 while George Eliot 124 and Thomas Hardy were particularly inspired by Milton s poetry and biography Hostile 20th century criticism by T S Eliot and Ezra Pound did not reduce Milton s stature 125 F R Leavis in The Common Pursuit responded to the points made by Eliot in particular the claim that the study of Milton could be of no help it was only a hindrance by arguing As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton The problem rather was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized belonging as it did to the climate of the habitual and natural 126 Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence wrote that Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English 127 Milton s Areopagitica is still cited as relevant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution 128 A 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 displayed in many public libraries including the New York Public Library The title of Philip Pullman s His Dark Materials trilogy is derived from a quotation His dark materials to create more worlds line 915 of Book II in Paradise Lost Pullman was concerned to produce a version of Milton s poem accessible to teenagers 129 and has spoken of Milton as our greatest public poet 130 Titles of a number of other well known literary works are also derived from Milton s writings Examples include Thomas Wolfe s Look Homeward Angel Aldous Huxley s Eyeless in Gaza Arthur Koestler s Darkness at Noon and William Golding s Darkness Visible 131 T S Eliot believed that of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry without our theological and political dispositions making unlawful entry 132 Literary legacy Edit Milton is commemorated in the temple of British Worthies Stowe Buckinghamshire Milton s use of blank verse in addition to his stylistic innovations such as grandiloquence of voice and vision peculiar diction and phraseology influenced later poets At the time poetic blank verse was considered distinct from its use in verse drama and Paradise Lost was taken as a unique exemplar 133 Said Isaac Watts in 1734 Mr Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us 134 Miltonic verse might be synonymous for a century with blank verse as poetry a new poetic terrain independent from both the drama and the heroic couplet Lack of rhyme was sometimes taken as Milton s defining innovation He himself considered the rhymeless quality of Paradise Lost to be an extension of his own personal liberty This neglect then of Rhime is to be esteem d an example set the first in English of ancient liberty recover d to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing 135 This pursuit of freedom was largely a reaction against conservative values entrenched within the rigid heroic couplet 136 Within a dominant culture that stressed elegance and finish he granted primacy to freedom breadth and imaginative suggestiveness eventually developed into the romantic vision of sublime terror Reaction to Milton s poetic worldview included grudgingly acknowledgement that of poet s resemblance to classical writers Greek and Roman poetry being unrhymed Blank verse came to be a recognised medium for religious works and for translations of the classics Unrhymed lyrics like Collins Ode to Evening in the meter of Milton s translation of Horace s Ode to Pyrrha were not uncommon after 1740 137 A second aspect of Milton s blank verse was the use of unconventional rhythm His blank verse paragraph and his audacious and victorious attempt to combine blank and rhymed verse with paragraphic effect in Lycidas lay down indestructible models and patterns of English verse rhythm as distinguished from the narrower and more strait laced forms of English metre 138 Before Milton the sense of regular rhythm had been knocked into the English head so securely that it was part of their nature 139 The Heroick measure according to Samuel Johnson is pure when the accent rests upon every second syllable through the whole line The repetition of this sound or percussion at equal times is the most complete harmony of which a single verse is capable 140 Caesural pauses most agreed were best placed at the middle and the end of the line In order to support this symmetry lines were most often octo or deca syllabic with no enjambed endings To this schema Milton introduced modifications which included hypermetrical syllables trisyllabic feet inversion or slighting of stresses and the shifting of pauses to all parts of the line 141 Milton deemed these features to be reflective of the transcendental union of order and freedom 142 Admirers remained hesitant to adopt such departures from traditional metrical schemes The English had been writing separate lines for so long that they could not rid themselves of the habit 143 Isaac Watts preferred his lines distinct from each other as did Oliver Goldsmith Henry Pemberton and Scott of Amwell whose general opinion it was that Milton s frequent omission of the initial unaccented foot was displeasing to a nice ear 144 It was not until the late 18th century that poets beginning with Gray began to appreciate the composition of Milton s harmony how he loved to vary his pauses his measures and his feet which gives that enchanting air of freedom and wilderness to his versification 145 By the 20th century American poet and critic John Hollander would go so far as to say that Milton was able by plying that most remarkable instrument of English meter to invent a new mode of image making in English poetry 146 Milton s pursuit of liberty extended into his vocabulary as well It included many Latinate neologisms as well as obsolete words already dropped from popular usage so completely that their meanings were no longer understood In 1740 Francis Peck identified some examples of Milton s old words now popular 147 The Miltonian dialect as it was called was emulated by later poets Pope used the diction of Paradise Lost in his Homer translation while the lyric poetry of Gray and Collins was frequently criticised for their use of obsolete words out of Spenser and Milton 148 The language of Thomson s finest poems e g The Seasons The Castle of Indolence was self consciously modelled after the Miltonian dialect with the same tone and sensibilities as Paradise Lost Following to Milton English poetry from Pope to John Keats exhibited a steadily increasing attention to the connotative the imaginative and poetic value of words 149 Musical settings Edit Milton s ode At a solemn Musick was set for choir and orchestra as Blest Pair of Sirens by Hubert Parry 1848 1918 and Milton s poem On the Morning of Christ s Nativity was set as a large scale choral work by Cyril Rootham 1875 1938 Milton also wrote the hymn Let us with a gladsome mind a versification of Psalm 136 His L Allegro and Il Penseroso with additional material were magnificently set by Handel 1740 Works EditThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed April 2017 Learn how and when to remove this template message Poetry and drama Edit 1629 On the Morning of Christ s Nativity 1630 On Shakespeare 1631 On Arriving at the Age of Twenty Three 1632 L Allegro 1632 Il Penseroso 1634 A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle 1634 commonly known as Comus a masque 1637 Lycidas 1645 Poems of Mr John Milton Both English and Latin 1652 When I Consider How My Light is Spent Commonly referred to as On his blindness though Milton did not use this title a 1655 On the Late Massacre in Piedmont 1667 Paradise Lost 1671 Paradise Regained 1671 Samson Agonistes 1673 Poems amp c Upon Several Occasions Arcades a masque date is unknown On his Deceased wife To The Nightingale On reaching the Age of twenty four Prose Edit Of Reformation 1641 Of Prelatical Episcopacy 1641 Animadversions 1641 The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty 1642 Apology for Smectymnuus 1642 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 1643 Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce 1644 Of Education 1644 Areopagitica 1644 Tetrachordon 1645 Colasterion 1645 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 1649 Eikonoklastes 1649 Defensio pro Populo Anglicano First Defence 1651 Defensio Secunda Second Defence 1654 A Treatise of Civil Power 1659 The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings from the Church 1659 The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth 1660 Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon 1660 Accedence Commenced Grammar 1669 The History of Britain 1670 Artis logicae plenior institutio Art of Logic 1672 Of True Religion 1673 Epistolae Familiaries 1674 Prolusiones 1674 A brief History of Moscovia and other less known Countries lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay gathered from the writings of several Eye witnesses 1682 De Doctrina Christiana 1823 Notes Edit When I consider how my light is spent is one of the best known of Milton s sonnets The last three lines concluding with They also serve who only stand and wait are particularly well known though rarely in context The poem may have been written as early as 1652 although most scholars believe it was composed sometime between June and October 1655 when Milton s blindness was essentially complete References Edit John Milton Poetry Foundation 19 April 2018 Rogers John Paradise Lost Book I YouTube Archived from the original on 30 October 2021 McCalman 2001 p 605 Contemporary Literary Criticism Milton John Introduction Archived 1 December 2009 at the Wayback Machine Murphy Arthur 1837 The Works of Samuel Johnson LL D An essay on the life and genius of Samuel Johnson New York NY George Dearborn Masson 1859 pp v vi a b Jenks Tudor 1905 In the Days of Milton New York A S Barnes amp Company pp 35 36 Forsyth Neil 2008 St Paul s John Milton A Biography 1st ed Oxford Lion Hudson p 16 ISBN 978 0745953106 Lewalski 2003 p 3 Skerpan Wheeler Elizabeth John Milton British Rhetoricians and Logicians 1500 1660 Second Series Ed Edward A Malone Detroit Gale 2003 Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol 281 Literature Resource Center a b Dick 1962 pp 270 275 Milton John MLTN624J A Cambridge Alumni Database University of Cambridge Hunter 1980 p 99 Wedgwood 1961 p 178 Hill 1977 p 34 Pfeiffer 1955 pp 363 373 Milton 1959 pp 887 888 Johnson 1826 Vol I p 64 Hill 1977 p 38 Lewalski 2003 p 103 Chaney 1985 and 2000 Lewalski 2003 pp 87 88 Lewalski 2003 pp 88 94 Milton 1959 Vol IV part I pp 615 617 Chaney 1985 and 2000 and Lewalski p 96 Chaney 1985 p 244 251 and Chaney 2000 p 313 Lewalski 2003 pp 94 98 Lewalski 2003 p 98 Milton 1959 Vol IV part I pp 618 619 Lewalski 2003 pp 99 109 a b Campbell Gordon 2004 Milton John 1608 1674 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Vol 1 Online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 18800 Retrieved 25 October 2013 Subscription or UK public library membership required Lobel 1957 pp 122 134 Lewalski 2003 pp 181 182 600 Ann Hughes Milton Areopagitica and the Parliamentary Cause The Oxford Handbook of Milton ed Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith Oxford University Press 2009 Blair Hoxby Areopagitica and Liberty The Oxford Handbook of Milton ed Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith Oxford University Press 2009 C Sullivan Milton and the Beginning of Civil Service in Literature in the Public Service 2013 Ch 2 Stephen Leslie 1894 Milton John 1608 1674 In Lee Sidney ed Dictionary of National Biography Vol 38 London Smith Elder amp Co p 32 von Maltzahn 1999 p 239 POOLEY ROGER 1993 The poets Cromwell Critical Survey 5 3 223 234 JSTOR 41555744 Corns Thomas N 2012 The Milton Encyclopedia Yale University Press p 216 ISBN 978 0300094442 Milton appointed Latin Secretary History Today www historytoday com Retrieved 3 August 2018 John Leonard in the introduction to Paradise Lost Penguin Classics page ix 2000 Sorsby A 1930 On The Nature of Milton s Blindness British Journal of Ophthalmology 14 7 339 354 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of Arts 8 November 1867 p 755 Johnson 1826 Vol I 86 Flood Alison When Milton met Shakespeare poet s notes on Bard appear to have been found Archived 18 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian 16 September 2019 Hill 1977 Lindenbaum Peter 1995 Authors and Publishers in the Late Seventeenth Century New Evidence on their Relations The Library Oxford University Press s6 17 3 250 269 doi 10 1093 library s6 17 3 250 ISSN 0024 2160 MeasuringWorth 2010 Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1264 to Present Access date 13 January 2017 Darbishire Helen October 1941 The Printing of the First Edition of Paradise Lost The Review of English Studies Oxford University Press 17 68 415 427 doi 10 1093 res os XVII 68 415 JSTOR 509858 John Milton s Paradise Lost The Morgan Library amp Museum Archived from the original on 21 July 2011 Retrieved 25 April 2011 See for instance Barker Arthur Milton and the Puritan Dilemma 1641 1660 Toronto University of Toronto Press 1942 338 and passim Wolfe Don M Milton in the Puritan Revolution New York T Nelson and Sons 1941 19 Stephen Fallon Milton Among the Philosophers Ithaca Cornell University Press 1991 p 81 a b Daiches David 1960 A Critical History of English Literature Vol I London Seeker amp Warburg p 457 Hill Christopher 1984 The World Turned Upside Down Radical Ideas During the English Revolution London Penguin ISBN 978 0140137323 a b Khan Abdul Hamid July September 2016 The Conflict of Puritanism in Milton An Analysis PDF The Dialogue XI 355 356 via Qurtuba University Pepine Mara Areopagitica A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc d Printing to the Parlament of England European Liberal Forum European Liberal Forum Retrieved 2 August 2022 Blair Worden Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England John Milton Andrew Marvell and Marchamont Nedham 2007 p 154 Milton and Republicanism ed David Armitage Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner Oxford Oxford University Press 1995 James Tully An Approach to Political Philosophy Locke in Contexts 1993 p 301 Austin Woolrych Commonwealth to Protectorate 1982 p 34 Worden p 149 Austin Woolrych Commonwealth to Protectorate 1982 p 101 G E Aylmer editor The Interregnum The Quest for Settlement 1646 1660 1972 p 17 Christopher Hill God s Englishman 1972 edition p 200 To S r Henry Vane the younger The Poetical Works of John Milton Creaser John W March 2000 John W Creaser Prosodic Style and Conceptions of Liberty in Milton and Marvell Milton Quarterly 34 1 Milton Quarterly Muse jhu edu 34 1 1 13 doi 10 1111 j 1094 348X 2000 tb00613 x S2CID 162341986 Retrieved 9 December 2008 William Riley Parker and Gordon Campbell Milton 1996 p 444 Nigel Smith Popular Republicanism in the 1650s John Streater s heroick mechanics p 154 in David Armitage Armand Himy Quentin Skinner editors Milton and Republicanism 1998 Blair Worden Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England John Milton Andrew Marvell and Marchamont Nedham 2007 Ch 14 Milton and the Good Old Cause Austin Woolrych Last 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38 John Rogers Newton s Arian Epistemology and the Cosmogony of Paradise Lost ELH English Literary History 86 1 2019 77 106 online Archived 9 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine Snobelen Stephen D 1999 Isaac Newton heretic the strategies of a Nicodemite PDF British Journal for the History of Science 32 4 381 419 doi 10 1017 S0007087499003751 S2CID 145208136 Archived from the original PDF on 8 September 2014 Arnold Williams Renaissance Commentaries on Genesis and Some Elements of the Theology of Paradise Lost PMLA Vol 56 No 1 Mar 1941 pp 151 164 Walter S H Lim John Milton Radical Politics and Biblical Republicanism 2006 p 141 John Rogers The Matter of Revolution Ithaca Cornell University Press 1998 p xi Hill C Milton and the English Revolution Faber amp Faber 1977 pp 155 157 Hunter William Bridges A Milton Encyclopedia Volume 8 East Brunswick NJ Associated University Presses 1980 pp 71 72 ISBN 0838718418 Nicholas McDowell Family Politics Or How John Phillips Read His Uncle s Satirical Sonnets Milton Quarterly Vol 42 Issue 1 pp 1 21 Published online 17 April 2008 Christopher Hill Milton and the English Revolution 1977 p 127 John Milton The Christian Doctrine in Complete Poems and Major Prose ed Merritt Hughes Hackett Indianapolis 2003 pp 994 1000 Leo Miller John Milton among the Polygamophiles New York Loewenthal Press 1974 Milton Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Notes Archived from the original on 4 July 2013 Retrieved 10 May 2013 Ernest Sirluck Introduction Complete Prose Works of John Milton New Haven Yale U Press 1959 II 103 Baillie Letters and Journals Edinburgh 1841 II 220 Lewalski Life of Milton p 199 Nicholas Von Maltzahn Milton s History of Britain republican historiography in the English Revolution Oxford Clarendon Press 1991 Timothy Kenyon Utopian Communism and Political Thought in Early Modern England 1989 p 34 Kevin Sharpe Remapping Early Modern England The Culture of Seventeenth century Politics 2000 p 7 J P Kenyon Revolution Principles 1977 p 77 Robert Middlekauff 2005 The Great Cause The American Revolution 1763 1789 Revised and Expanded Edition Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0195315882 pp 51 136ff Zagorin Perez 2002 The World of Milton Scholarship Virginia Quarterly Review Retrieved 11 May 2016 Forsyth Neil 2008 John Milton A Biography Lion Books p 15 ISBN 978 0745953106 Al Zubi Hasan A 2007 Audience and human nature in the poetry of Milton and Dryden Milton ve Dryden in siirlerinde izleyici ve insan dogasi Archived from the original on 24 January 2011 Retrieved 9 December 2008 via Find Articles Joseph M Levine The Battle of the Books History and Literature in the Augustan Age 1994 p 247 Online text of one book Andromeda rutgers edu Retrieved 4 January 2010 Christopher Ricks Milton s Grand Style 1963 pp 9 14 57 William Empson Some Versions of Pastoral 1974 edition p 147 Nos 267 273 279 285 291 297 303 309 315 321 327 333 339 345 351 357 363 and 369 Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton s Paradise Lost 1734 Voltaire Le Siecle de Louis XIV 2 Paris Garnier Flammarion 1966 p 66 S Foster Damon A Blake Dictionary 1973 p 274 Bill Beckley Sticky Sublime 2001 p 63 Part II Section I Adelaide edu au Archived 26 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine Francis T Palgrave ed 1824 1897 The Golden Treasury 1875 Bartleby com Retrieved 4 January 2010 Thomas N Corns A Companion to Milton 2003 p 474 a b Leader Zachary Revision and Romantic Authorship Oxford Oxford University Press 1999 298 ISBN 0198186347 Cited from the original in J Paul Hunter editor Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 1996 p 225 Birrell Augustine 1887 John Milton Obiter Dicta Second Series Nardo Anna K George Eliot s Dialogue with Milton Printz Pahlson Goran Letters of Blood and Other Works in English 1 Archived 25 December 2022 at the Wayback Machine pp 10 14 Leavis F R The Common Pursuit https books google com books id 9Yl1ax4 hukC amp printsec frontcover v onepage Archived 25 December 2022 at the Wayback Machine Harold Bloom The Anxiety of Influence A theory of poetry 1997 p 33 Milton s Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment by Vincent Blasi Nationalhumanitiescenter org Archived from the original on 14 December 2007 Retrieved 4 January 2010 Imitating Milton The Legacy of Paradise Lost University of Cambridge Archived from the original on 1 February 2008 Retrieved 4 January 2010 Philip Pullman opens Bodleian Milton exhibition University of Oxford Archived from the original on 12 January 2009 Retrieved 4 January 2010 Rosen J Return to Paradise The New Yorker 2 June 2008 pp 72 76 Eliot 1947 p 63 Saintsbury 1908 ii 443 Watts 1810 iv 619 Milton 1668 xi Gordon 2008 p 234 Dexter 1922 p 46 Saintsbury 1908 ii 457 Saintsbury 1916 p 101 Johnson 1751 no 86 Dexter 1922 p 57 Saintsbury 1908 ii 458 459 Dexter 1922 p 59 Saintsbury 1916 p 114 Gray 1748 Observations on English Metre Hollander John 1975 Vision and resonance two senses of poetic form New York Oxford University Press pp 116 ISBN 0195018982 OCLC 1530446 They included self same hue minstrelsy murky carol and chaunt Among Milton s naturalized Latin words were humid orient hostil facil fervid jubilant ire bland reluctant palpable fragil and ornate Peck 1740 pp 110 111 Scott 1785 63 Saintsbury 1908 ii 468 Sources EditBeer Anna Milton Poet Pamphleteer and Patriot New York Bloomsbury Press 2008 Campbell Gordon and Corns Thomas John Milton Life Work and Thought Oxford Oxford University Press 2008 Chaney Edward The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion Richard Lassels and The Voyage of Italy in the Seventeenth Century Geneva CIRVI 1985 and Milton s Visit to Vallombrosa A literary tradition The Evolution of the Grand Tour 2nd ed Routledge London 2000 Dexter Raymond The Influence of Milton on English Poetry London Kessinger Publishing 1922 Dick Oliver Lawson Aubrey s Brief Lives Harmondsworth Middlesex Penguin Books 1962 Eliot T S Annual Lecture on a Master Mind Milton Proceedings of the British Academy 33 1947 Fish Stanley Versions of Antihumanism Milton and Others Oxford 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Hundred 1957 pp 122 134 Masson David The Life of John Milton and History of His Time Vol 1 Oxford 1859 McCalman Iain et al An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age British Culture 1776 1832 Oxford Oxford University Press 2001 Milner Andrew John Milton and the English Revolution A Study in the Sociology of Literature London Macmillan 1981 Milton John Complete Prose Works 8 Vols gen ed Don M Wolfe New Haven Yale University Press 1959 Milton John The Verse Paradise Lost London 1668 Peck Francis New Memoirs of Milton London 1740 Pfeiffer Robert H The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America The Jewish Quarterly Review April 1955 Rosenfeld Nancy The Human Satan in Seventeenth Century English Literature From Milton to Rochester Aldershot Ashgate 2008 Saintsbury George The Peace of the Augustans A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment London Oxford University Press 1946 Saintsbury George A History of English Prosody From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day London Macmillan and Co 1908 Scott John Critical Essays London 1785 Stephen Leslie 1902 New Lights on Milton Studies of a Biographer Vol 4 London Duckworth amp Co pp 86 129 Sullivan Ceri Literature in the Public Service Divine Bureaucracy 2013 Toland John Life of Milton in The Early Lives of Milton Ed Helen Darbishere London Constable 1932 von Maltzahn Nicholas Milton s Readers in The Oxford Companion to Milton ed Dennis Richard Danielson Oxford Oxford University Press 1999 Watts Isaac Miscellaneous Thoughts No lxxiii Works 1810 Wedgwood C V Thomas Wentworth First Earl of Strafford 1593 1641 New York Macmillan 1961 Wilson A N The Life of John Milton Oxford Oxford University Press 1983 External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Milton Wikisource has original works by or about John Milton Wikiquote has quotations related to John Milton Works by John Milton in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by John Milton at Project Gutenberg Works by or about John Milton at 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