3.21: John Milton (1608-1674)

Education and Early Writing

John Milton was born in London to John Milton, a scrivener and composer, and Sarah Jeffrey. His education followed a common route, with his first being tutored by Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian cleric, then studying at Saint Paul’s School, before entering Christ’s College, Cambridge. He studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, reading the classical and modern works on philosophy, religion, science, history, politics, and literature. Not surprisingly, he placed fourth out of 259 candidates for the bachelor’s degree, which he earned cum laude in 1629, followed by a master’s degree in 1632 (also cum laude).

But Milton’s education, his scholarship, was far from common. He studied to an extraordinary degree and with the clear intent of preparing himself to be a Poet. After earning his degrees, Milton then spent time at his parents’ home in Hammersmith, where he focused on his vocation, writing sonnets, the masque “Comus” (1634), and “Lycidas” (1637), a pastoral elegy for his friend Edward King. In “Lycidas,” he declared his intention as a poet to follow in the steps of Virgil, deliberately moving from the pastoral to the epic (Milton). In this way, he consciously carried Spenser’s banner of the national Poet.

After his mother’s death, Milton again followed an apparently common educational route by traveling to the Continent, particularly France and Italy. But his vocation appears in his meeting playwright and poet Hugo Grotius (1583- 1645); Giavanni Battisti Manso (1567-1645), the patron of Torquato Tasso (1544- 1595); and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). He thought to put all of his preparation to good service upon his return to England, which was on the verge of Civil War. He determined to write an epic based on English history, a national epic that would define England just as Virgil’s Aeneid defined Rome—again, carrying Spenser’s banner, also acknowledging Chaucer in this great ambition.

Political Service and the Commonwealth

Milton first put his skills to more immediate use, writing pamphlets, tracts, and political addresses supporting the Commonwealth. These prose pieces include The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660); The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644); the Areopagitica (1664), in which he argued against censorship; and Eikonoklastes (1649) and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), arguing for the English having executed Charles I (Milton). He also served the Commonwealth as its Latin Secretary, in which role he corresponded with rulers and diplomats throughout Europe. He devoted himself to the cause of republicanism to his own physical detriment; he lost his eyesight by 1642 from, as he believed, the eyestrain his work incurred.

Paradise Lost

Upon the Restoration, he temporarily lost his freedom, permanently lost most of his estate, and almost lost his life for being a rebel. After the intervention of friends like Marvell, Milton was released from prison and allowed to retire. He then composed his epic, Paradise Lost. At one point in time, he thought to write an Arthurian epic, as did Spenser. But he decided that his subject of the Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden would surpass that of all other epics due to its moral weight. With this intent, his Paradise Lost transformed the classic epic into an expression of Renaissance humanism and of the Reformation. His use of blank verse, rather than rhymed verse like Spenser’s, gave his epic immediate and dramatic voice.

He transforms epic convention; for example, the naming of the fallen angels before they raise Pandemonium in Book 1 is Milton’s version of the Iliad’s catalog of ships, but Milton’s catalog reveals the true evil of these destroyers of life. His epic similes and metaphors do not take readers away from the action, as do Homer’s, but instead offer profound commentary on it. For example, Eden is differentiated from “Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers / Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis / Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain / To seek her through the world” through the more tender love and suffering of the redeeming son of God (Milton 4.269-72). Milton’s descent into the underworld is a descent into Hell itself, which becomes a psychological exploration of the sorrow and rage of the diabolic mind through a troubled landscape, moving from Pandemonium palace to “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” (Milton 2.621).

Further, Milton imbues classical archetypes with individual (psychological) insight. Book 3’s Invocation to Light, for example, reverses the rise and fall of Icarus who flew too close to the sun; it moves down into despair and up to love, as Milton uses his own feelings on his loss of sight for the reader’s behalf. Milton's personal underworld is that he cannot see; He is cut off from light and Nature’s book of knowledge. However, that loss becomes the precondition for vision in a paradoxical fortunate fall, as celestial light shines inwardly and enables Milton to “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (3.54-55). Indeed, Milton's Paradise Lost went beyond establishing national identity by being a theodicy. Paradise Lost vindicates the justice of God in ordaining or permitting natural and moral evil through insights such as this fortunate fall and conversion (Milton).

Works Cited

Milton, John. Areopagitica (1644). 1664. John Milton: Selected Prose, edited by C. A. Patrides, new and rev. ed., University of Missouri Press, 1985, pp. 196-248. EBSCO, (CRC Library).

---. Eikonoklastēs.: In Answer to a Book Intitled, Eikōn Basilikē, the Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. 1649. Corrected by Richard Baron, 1770. HathiTrust, (CRC Library).

---. "Comus." 1634. L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas, produced by Edward A. Malone, e-book ed., Project Gutenberg, 1 Jan. 2021. Project Gutenberg. 

---. A Defence of the Poeple of England: In Answer to Salmasius's Defence of the King / by John Milton. Translated by Joseph Washington, Princeton University Library, 1692. JSTOR, (CRC Library).

---. The Doctrine of Discipline of Divorce (1643; Revised 1644) [Condensed]. 1643, revised 1644. John Milton: Selected Prose, edited by C. A. Patrides, new and rev. ed., University of Missouri Press, 1985, pp. 112-80. EBSCO, (CRC Library).

---. "Lycidas." 1637. L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas, produced by Edward A. Malone, e-book ed., Project Gutenberg, 1 Jan. 2021. Project Gutenberg. 

---. Paradise Lost. Introduced by Philip Pullman, Oxford University Press, 2005. EBSCO, (CRC Library).

---. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. 1660. Edited by Evert Mordecai Clark, Yale University Press, 1915. HathiTrust, (CRC Library).