John milton

John Milton 1608 - 1674"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
-of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
-brought death into the world, and all our woe, 
-with loss of Eden."-(exerpt from Paradise Lost) |
One of the greatest poets of the English language, best-known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). John Milton's powerful, rhetoric prose and the eloquence of his poetry had animmense influence especially on the 18th-century verse. Besides poems, John Milton published pamphlets defending civil and religious rights.
John Milton was born in London. His mother Sarah Jeffrey was the daughter of a merchant sailor, and his father had risen to prosperity as a scrivener or law writer - he also composed music. The family was wealthy enough to afford a second house in the country.Milton was educated at St Paul's School and then at Christ's College, Cambridge (1625-32), where he was called, half in scorn, "The Lady of Christ's." During his Cambridge period, while considering himself destined for the ministry, he began to write poetry in Latin, Italian, and English. He was expelled for a term after starting a brawl with his tutor.
On leaving Cambridge Milton had given uphis original plan to become a priest. He adopted no profession but spent six years at leisure in his father's home, writing during that time L'Allegro, Il Penseroso (1632), Comus (1634), and Lycidas (1637). In 1635 the Miltons moved to Horton, Buckinghamshire, where John Milton pursued his studies in Greek, Latin, and Italian. He then traveled in France and Italy some time in the late 1630s, meetingin Paris the jurist and theologian Hugo Grotius and the astronomer Galileo Galilei in Florence - there are references to Galileo's telescope in Paradise Lost. His conversation with the blind scientist Milton recorded in Areopagitica, which attacked censorship. Milton returned to London in 1639, and set up a school with his nephews and a few others as pupils. The Civil War silenced his poetic workfor 20 years. The war had divided the country as Oliver Cromwell fought against the king, Charles I.
Concerned with the Puritan cause, John Milton wrote a series of pamphlets against episcopacy (1642), on divorce (1643), in defense of the liberty of the press (1644), and in support of the regicides (1649). He also served as the secretary for foreign languages in Cromwell's government. After thedeath of Charles I, John Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) supporting the view that the people had the right to depose and punish tyrants.
In 1651, John Milton became blind, but like Jorge Luis Borges is our century, blindness helped to stimulate his verbal richness. "He sacrificed his sight, and then he remembered his forst desire, that of geing a poet," Borges wrote inone of his lectures. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, he was arrested as a noted defender of the Commonwealth, but was soon released. Besides public burning of Eikonklastes and the first Defensio in Paris and Toulouse, John Milton escaped from more punishment after Restoration, but he became a relatively poor man. In the 1660's, John Milton moved with his third wife to what is nowBurnhill Row. He spent the remaining years of his life there, apart from a brief visit to Chalfont St. Giles in 1665, to avoid the plague. His late poems were dictated to his daughter, nephews, friends, disciples, and paid amanuenses.
John Milton was married three times (Mary Powell - 1642, Katherine Woodcock - 1656, Elizabeth Minshull - 1662). His marriages were unsuccessful. Mary Powell grew boredwith the life of a poet soon after the honeymoon was over and went back home where she stayed for three years. John Milton wrote his famous essays on divorce. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) John Milton argued that a true marriage was of mind as well as of body, and that the chaste and modest were more likely to find themselves "chained unnaturally together" in unsuitable...