Milton, John

Milton, John (1608–74), son of John Milton the elder, a scrivener and composer of music. He was educated at St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he wrote poetry in Latin, Italian, and English, on both sacred and secular themes. His first known attempts at English verse, ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’ and ‘At a Vacation Exercise’, were probably written in 1628. His first distinctively Miltonic work, ‘On the Morning of Christs Nativity’, written in 1629, shows a growing mastery of stanza and structure, an exuberant and at times baroque use of imagery, and the love of resounding proper names so marked in his later work. His fragmentary ‘The Passion’ was probably written in 1630, and the ‘Arcades’ probably in 1632. ‘On Shakespeare’, his two epitaphs for Hobson, the university carrier, and ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ belong to 1631. His twin poems, ‘L'Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, may also have been written at Cambridge. On leaving Cambridge he embarked on an ambitious course of private study at his father's home in preparation for a future as poet or clergyman; his Latin poem ‘Ad Patrem’ (?1634) appears to be an attempt to persuade his father that the two pursuits were reconcilable. His ‘masque’ Comus was published anonymously in 1637, in which year he wrote Lycidas, a pastoral elegy. During the 20 years that elapsed between this and his composition of Paradise Lost, Milton wrote no poetry, apart from some Latin and Italian pieces, and some sonnets, of which the most notable are those ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’, on his blindness, on his deceased wife, his addresses to Cromwell, Fairfax, and Vane, and those to Lawes (with whom he had collaborated on the ‘Arcades’ and Comus) and to his young friends and students Edward Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner. From 1638 to 1639 Milton travelled abroad, chiefly in Italy; he met Grotius in Paris and Galileo. His Latin epitaph on his friend Diodati, Epitaphium Damonis, written in 1639, is his finest Latin poem.

His attentions were now diverted by historical events to many years of pamphleteering and political activity, and to a tireless defence of religious, civil, and domestic liberties. In 1641 he published a series of five pamphlets against episcopacy, engaging in controversy with bishops Hall and Ussher, and displaying from the first (Of Reformation in England and the Causes that Hitherto Have Hindered It) a vigorous, colourful Ciceronian prose, and a keenly polemic spirit which could yet rise to visions of apocalyptic grandeur. The Reason of Church Government (1642) was followed by An Apology against a Pamphlet…against Smectymnuus (1642), which contains interesting autobiographical details. In July 1642 Milton married Mary Powell, daughter of Royalist parents; he was 33, she 17. Within six weeks he consented to her going home to her parents near Oxford on condition that she returned by Michaelmas. She did not do so, for reasons perhaps connected with the outbreak of the Civil War. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) argues among other points that a true marriage was of mind as well as of body. This pamphlet made him notorious, but he pursued his arguments in three more on the subject of divorce in 1644–5, including Tetrachordon. Of Education, and Areopagitica, his great defence of the liberty of the press, both appeared in 1644. At this time he became aware of his growing blindness; by 1652 he was to be totally blind.

After the execution of Charles I, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). He was appointed Latin secretary to the newly formed Council of State, retaining the post until the Restoration. The State papers he wrote include an interesting series of dispatches (1655–8) on the subject of the expulsion and massacre of the Protestant Vaudois. He replied officially to Eikon Basilike in Eikonoklastes (i.e. Imagebreaker, 1649), and to the Defensio Regia of Salmasius in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), a work which created a furore on the Continent and was publicly burned in Paris and Toulouse; also to Du Moulin's Clamor in Defensio Secunda (1654). He was now assisted in his secretarial duties successively by G. R. Weckherlin, Philip Meadows, and Marvell. His first wife (having rejoined him in 1645) died in 1652, three days after the birth of their third daughter, and in 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock, then aged 28, who died in 1658. On the eve of the Restoration, he boldly published The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a last-minute attempt to defend the ‘Good old Cause’ of republicanism. At the Restoration he went into hiding briefly, then was arrested, fined, and released: D'avenant and Marvell are said to have interceded on his behalf. He now returned to poetry and set about the composition of Paradise Lost (1667). In 1663 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull (who survived him by more than 50 years). Paradise Regained was published in 1671 with Samson Agonistes. In these later years he also published a History of Britain (1670), and a compendium of Ramus's Logic (1672). In 1673 appeared a second edition of his Poems originally published in 1645, including most of his minor verse.

Milton died from ‘gout struck in’ and was buried beside his father in St Giles', Cripplegate. There are full biographies by D. Masson (1859–94) and W. R. Parker (1968). Milton's towering stature as a writer was recognized early. Although appreciated as a master of polemical prose as well as of subtle lyric harmony, his reputation rests largely on Paradise Lost, which Dryden (who made a rhymed version of it) was describing by 1677 as ‘one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced’. Poets and critics in the 18th cent. were profoundly influenced by Milton's use of blank verse (previously confined largely to drama) and his treatment of the sublime, and he inspired many serious and burlesque imitations and adaptations.