John Milton

John Milton was born in London in 1608 and died there in 1674. After Christ's College, Cambridge, he spent much of his middle life as a pamphleteer, writing against church hierarchy and for the parliamentary cause in the Civil War. In March 1649 he became Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, drafting the republic's correspondence with foreign governments. He held the post until 1660 and was blind by the end of it.

His earlier poems include the masque Comus (1634) and Lycidas (1637), an elegy for a Cambridge acquaintance, Edward King. In prose his best-known work is Areopagitica (1644), an attack on prepublication censorship. Across all of it runs a concern with liberty of conscience, with choice, and with where obedience to authority ends. His poetry is built for the ear, with long, weighted sentences, and it borrows deliberately from the epics of Homer and Virgil.

Milton dropped an early plan for an Arthurian epic and wrote on a biblical subject instead. Paradise Lost appeared in ten books in 1667 and in twelve in 1674, at close to 11,000 lines. It did not win wide admiration at first; Andrew Marvell was among the friends who praised it in verse in the 1674 edition. Paradise Regained and the closet drama Samson Agonistes followed in 1671.

Start with Paradise Lost, the poem on WebToTell. Book 1 states its aim, to justify the ways of God to man, and Book 6 gives the battle in heaven. If the epic's length feels daunting, Lycidas is a shorter way into his verse, and Areopagitica shows the polemicist.