Milton, John (poet)

English poet and prose writer. His epic Paradise Lost (1667) is one of the landmarks of English literature. Early poems, including Comus (a masque performed in 1634) and Lycidas (an elegy, 1638), showed Milton's outstanding lyric gift. He also wrote many pamphlets and prose works, including Areopagitica (1644), which opposed press censorship.

Born in Cheapside, London, and educated at St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge, Milton was a scholarly poet, ambitious to match the classical epics, and with strong theological views. He published prose works on republicanism and church government. His middle years were devoted to the Puritan cause and writing pamphlets, including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), which may have been based on his own experience of marital unhappiness. In 1643 Milton married Mary Powell, the 17-year-old daughter of an Oxfordshire cavalier. After an attempt to seek a divorce, she returned to Milton and three daughters were born of the marriage; they later became his somewhat unwilling scribes. In 1649 Milton's reputation as a Latinist led to his appointment as Latin secretary to the Council of State. During his time as secretary to the lord protector, Oliver Cromwell and the Council of State, Milton's assistants, as his sight failed, included English poet Andrew Marvell. In 1652 his wife died and four years later he married Katherine Woodcock; both she and their baby daughter died in childbirth in 1658. At the Restoration he was deprived of his office, and had to go into hiding; but on the intercession of Marvell, and perhaps English poet and dramatist William Davenant, his name was included in the amnesty. In 1663 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, aged 25, who appears to have given him domestic happiness in his last years. Paradise Lost and the less successful sequel Paradise Regained (1671) were written when he was blind and in some political danger (after the restoration of Charles II), as was the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes (1671). In addition to his blindness, Milton suffered from gout; his strength gradually declined. He died in 1674 and was buried in the chancel of St Giles, Cripplegate, London.