Milton, John (1608–1674)

MILTON, JOHN (1608–1674)

MILTON, JOHN (1608–1674), English poet. England's epic poet and champion of civil and religious liberties was born in London on 9 December 1608, entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1625, and earned his M.A. in 1632. His conscience prevented him from becoming a clergyman in the Church of England under the repressive Archbishop William Laud, and his talent and his "great taskmaster" (Sonnet 7) led him to poetry, "the inspired guift of God . . . of power beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of vertu, and publick civility . . . and set the affections in right tune" (CPW 1:816–817). In 1638–1639 Milton traveled in Europe, met members of the Florentine Academies, visited Galileo Galilei, "a pris[o]ner to the Inquisition" (CPW 2:538), and shipped music books from Venice; but hearing that "my fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty" (CPW 4.1:619), he returned to write on behalf of the religious and political reformation of England.

In 1649, after the parliamentary victory, Milton was appointed secretary for foreign tongues by the Council of State and asked to defend the execution of Charles I; he produced Eikonoklastes (The image-breaker), arguing that the king is not above the rule of law. In 1652 he became blind but continued his work for the Commonwealth government, with assistance from Andrew Marvell, who also helped obtain his release from imprisonment after the Restoration.

PROSE WORKS

Milton's major prose concerns religious, political, and domestic liberty. Five tracts promoting religious reformation appeared in 1641–1642. Of Education (1644) proposes a curriculum "to repair the ruins of our first parents" (CPW 2:366) through biblical and classical works in their original languages and the direct observation of nature and technology. Areopagitica (1644), credited with a part in the founding principles of the American republic, opposes prepublication licensing of books and urges that truth seeking requires the freedom of a well-instructed conscience. Four tracts on marriage and divorce (1643–1645) argue that God instituted marriage for mutual help and companionship in both spiritual and domestic life and that God's laws should be interpreted by the rule of charity. Whether these were motivated in part by the three-year sojourn of his young wife, Mary Powell, with her Royalist parents is disputed. After her return the union produced three daughters and a short-lived son. Four years after Mary's death following childbirth, Milton married Katherine Woodcock, who died three months after the birth of a daughter who also died, and later Elizabeth Minshull, who outlived him.

Numerous tracts against absolute monarchy and against any usurpation of conscience by civil or ecclesiastical powers appeared between 1649 and 1673. Other prose works include academic prolusions, letters, and state papers, a Christian Doctrine (authorship of parts disputed), a grammar textbook, The History of Britain (1670), and an Art of Logic (1672).

SHORTER POEMS

In 1645 Milton published his Poems . . . Both English and Latin: masques, odes, hymns, epigrams, elegies, epitaphs, sonnets often praising particular men and women, and metrical translations of Psalms 114 and 136, both songs of liberation. The Poems include a prophetic ode, "On the morning of Christ's Nativity," written in 1629; companion poems on the active and the contemplative life, "L'allegro" and "Il penseroso" (both 1632); and "At a Solemn Musick," in praise of the power of words and music to raise the imagination to the "Song of pure concent" that "we on Earth . . . May rightly answer" as we did before sin "Broke the fair music that all creatures made"—a prelude to Paradise Lost. "Lycidas," a pastoral elegy written in 1637, laments a drowned schoolmate as shepherd-poet and promising pastor and considers hard questions about God's ways. Arcades (1633?) and A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (sometimes called "Comus"; written in 1634 and published in 1637) concern good government and the right use of nature. The young heroine of A Mask defends chastity against Comus's lures and argues for the just and temperate use of nature's gifts. The Latin poems include elegies and epigrams, two on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; a revealing verse letter to his father; and a poignant epitaph for his friend Charles Diodati. Milton's Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673) adds others both personal and political. "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont" (1655) is a cry of outrage against violent persecution.

MAJOR POEMS

Paradise Lost was published in ten books in 1667 and twelve in 1674. Rather than a national epic with warrior heroes, Milton wrote an epic of all humanity and the claims of God and Satan, founded on Genesis and incorporating classical allusions, that redefines heroism and merit. Milton raises hard questions—for example, how can liberty be preserved in the face of evil?—and provokes complex responses. Because of its biblical sources, some readers associate the epic with interpretations of the Bible that postcolonial, gender-conscious, and ecologically aware readers reject. But Milton did not accept traditional readings that had been used to support dominion and conquest over nature, women, and peoples. He reorients the Genesis story—to what extent is a matter of debate—toward a more liberal and complex understanding of human liberty and responsibility. His rejection of the separability of body and spirit and his interpretation of the Trinity, which portrays the Son not as coequal and coeternal with the Father but as having free will and being exalted by merit, are heretical according to the orthodoxy of his time and are still controversial. Recent scholarship shows that as a monist materialist he believed that all creatures are kindred, created from the same matter derived from God, and that the divine image in men and women, though tragically obscured by the Fall, is, for those who choose regeneration, more fully reparable on earth, as well as in heaven, than orthodox predestinarian and dualistic believers could imagine.

Milton's other major poems came forth in 1671 as Paradise Regain'd. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes. Paradise Regained expands the biblical temptations to power and glory (Luke 4:1–13 and Matthew 4:1–11) to include wealth and luxury. It represents the Son of God, fully human though divine, clarifying his understanding of his mission while Satan tests him to find out who he is and whether he can be foiled. Jesus refuses easy answers, rejects war, power, riches, and philosophies inconsequential to his calling, and stands miraculously on the temple pinnacle by his own balance as well as God's will. Samson Agonistes, though not intended for the stage, is structured as a Greek tragedy, in which encounters with the disordered passions of others provoke Samson's recovery from despair. Some readers see in the blind and exiled Samson, whose story is told in the Book of Judges, correspondences with Milton's own situation. Current critics debate the problem of Samson's violence: Is he a terrorist, a divinely led liberator, or an imperfect type of divine justice that Christ will perfect? Further, does Milton attempt to control his readers or to provoke response and dialogue? His poems engage responsive reading with all the resources of language, including surprising syntax, alternative definitions and allusions, punning etymologies, rich imagery, many-layered metaphor, and prosody that mimes the actions of human and angelic characters and other living things. The music of his language is an inexhaustible delight. He teaches readers to hold complex relations in mind and to imagine polyphonically—as one must do to think responsibly and feel responsively in a complex world. A reading community debating these choices and enjoying these pleasures will learn to perceive the interwovenness of experience and the misuse of power. Milton's epic and dramatic poems do not offer easy answers but help us think creatively and deliberatively about the difficult issues of our own times.

See also English Civil War and Interregnum ; English Literature and Language ; Laud, William ; Puritanism .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven, 1953–1983. [Cited as CPW. ]

——. Milton: The Complete Poems. Edited by John Leonard. London, 1998. Modern spelling with original forms retained as needed to preserve prosody, puns, and ambiguities.

——. The Works of John Milton. Edited by F. A. Patterson, et al. 18 vols. New York, 1931–1938.

Secondary Sources

Bennett, Joan S. Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989.

Corns, Thomas N., ed. A Companion to Milton. Oxford, 2001. Paperback, 2003.

Danielson, Dennis, ed. Cambridge Companion to Milton. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.

Dobranski, Stephen B., and John P. Rumrich, eds. Milton and Heresy. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.

DuRocher, Richard J. Milton among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton's Latin Curriculum. Pittsburgh, 2001.

Edwards, Karen L. Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.

Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1991.

Labriola, Albert, C., Paul Klemp, et al., eds. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. New York, 1970–.

Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Oxford, 2000.

Milton Quarterly, ed. Roy C. Flannagan.

Milton Studies, eds. James D. Simmonds (1967–1991) and Albert C. Labriola. (1992–).

Parry, Graham, and Joad Raymond, eds. Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Cambridge, U.K., and Rochester, N.Y., 2002.

Patterson, Annabel M. ed. John Milton. London and New York, 1992.

Rajan, Balachandra, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Milton and the Imperial Vision. Pittsburgh, 1999.

Revard, Stella P. Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems. Columbia, Mo., 1997.

Schulman, Lydia Dittler. Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic. Boston, 1992.

Shawcross, John T., ed. Milton: The Critical Heritage [1624–1731]. London and New York, 1970.

——. Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston, 1972.

Diane Kelsey Mccolley